A POSSIBLE METHOD FOR THE RAPID ASSESSMENT OF BIODIVERSITY

Inventories of vertebrate and-flowering plants are frequently used as surrogates for estimates of total biodiversity. This is in part becaus e the inclusion of invertebrates and nonflowering plants is perceived as being too time-consuming costly, and difficult because of the short age of specialists. Estimates of the species richness of field samples of spiders, ants, polychaetes, and mosses made by a biodiversity tech nician and by specialist taxonomists were compared The biodiversity te chnician received a few hours training in the taxonomy of each group a nd separated specimens into recognizable taxonomic units (RTUs). The s pecialists sorted to species, For the three animal groups the biodiver sity technician recorded 165 taxa and the specialists 147 with the err or for the ants and spiders being 13% or less. A small amount of split ting and lumping of species was detected. The concordance of estimates remained very similar when small subsamples were used The procedure w as repeated by 13 undergraduates using a subsample of spiders. Their a verage error was 14.4%. The greatest similarity in estimates was for t he mosses, but with high levels of splitting and lumping this result w as entirely fortuitous. The results suggest that RTU estimates made by biodiversity technicians may be sufficiently close to formal taxonomi c estimates of species richness to be useful for the rapid assessment of biodiversity They also show however, that the procedures outlined h ere should be used on invertebrate and nonflowering plant groups befor e they can be confidently included in biodiversity surveys.