Sampling Biodiversity in Bornean Frogs

Abstract

Analysis of biodiversity is attracting increasing interest withinthe public arena, with many articles appearing in newspapers and popularmagazines. This change is understandable because of the relationship ofbiodiversity to conservation in an increasingly stressed global environment.There is equal interest in biodiversity and related issues in scientific circlesbecause of their relationship to questions in ecology, evolutionary biology,and conservation biology. The term biodiversity is often used as though itmeant only the numbers of species (species richness), but the diversity of lifeis much more complex than that.The scientific literature on biodiversity is centered on three mainsubjects: lists of species occurring in a small region, comparisons of thespecies occurring in different environments within a region, and comparisonsof the species occurring in different regions. Unfortunately, the scientificliterature on biodiversity is frequently marred by errors in sampling.This paper will illustrate some aspects of biodiversity drawing upon workon the frogs of Borneo. My studies of the frogs of Borneo were designed toexplore local and regional diversity, the impact of environmental differenceson regional diversity, and the variation between species in the patterns of lifecycles. Examples of these aspects of biodiversity are given.