Report on international efforts in research, monitoring and capacity building in the field of marine and coastal biological diversity

Nowadays the issue of marine and coastal biodiversity extends well beyond the historical diversity concept, which dealt with the measurement of the richness (in terms of species) within a certain natural community (ensemble of natural populations, where each population is composed by individuals belonging to the same species) or within a certain area. Indices were used, some of which also dealt with the ecological components of diversity, such as the evenness index, which measures whether species diversity also corresponds to differences in the distribution of the number of individuals within each species, thus measuring the ecological significance of diversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity defines biological diversity as ‘the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.’