Gamma diversity

Gamma diversity is the total species diversity found across an entire landscape or region, one of three measures of biodiversity introduced together by the ecologist R. H. Whittaker. The insight behind the framework is that this landscape level diversity results from combining two other measures: alpha diversity, the average species diversity found within individual local sites, and beta diversity, the degree to which species composition differs from one site to another, commonly expressed as gamma equal to alpha multiplied by beta. The framework lets ecologists separate how diverse a place is locally from how much that diversity changes across the wider landscape.