In recent years, there has been growing interest among researchers, governmental agencies, resource managers and environmental conservation groups in elaborating and testing synthetic indicators of biodiversity in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Such indicators are designed as surrogates for species richness and are often intended to evaluate the outcome of conservation actions. Indicators may be based on "indicator species", i.e. species whose presence and abundance are related to global biodiversity (Lindenmayer et al., 2000), or based on the species richness of one or several groups of organisms. These indicators
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