Biodiversity is simply the diversity of life on Earth.
Estimates of the total number of species vary widely from 3 million to 30 million, but most estimates place the range between 5 and 10 million.
Measuring biodiversity
Richness is a measure of the number of organisms present in a given area. Equivalence measures whether each species is represented in a community with roughly the same number of individuals, or whether one or two species have very large numbers and the other species have smaller numbers.
Biodiversity can be used to make life-saving medicines, or they are aesthetically pleasing.