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News From the Field

New Theory Gives More Precise Estimates of Large-scale Biodiversity


July 9, 2009

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The Census Bureau is good at profiling the U.S. population by sampling small groups of people. Biologists, however, lack a good theory of how to estimate the richness of life in large areas like the Amazon from small-plot studies. University of California, Berkeley ecologist John Harte has applied information theory to develop a new and robust theory that does a much better job predicting biodiversity in large biomes, and could be a boon to conservation biologists.Full Story

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University of California, Berkeley

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