Validation of Theoretical Approach to measure Biodiversity using Bird Species of a Seminatural Grassland in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Biodiversity is a term that has recently been widely used. It is the variety and variability among living organisms and the ecological complexes in which they occur. The ongoing Worldwide biodiversity crisis comes along with a growing demand for feasible environmental indicators to measure, evaluate and communicate anthropogenic influence on biodiversity. Those indicators can be useful tools for national and regional management and support decision making processes. Therefore, LBCI (Landscape Biodiversity Capacity Index) might be a reliable method to measure biodiversity capacity, using land use data. The LBCI method is based on two indicators which are; 1. The landscape functional connectivity and 2. Landscape heterogeneity which includes number of biotopes and evenness of all these biotopes in the specified landscape. The aim of the study was to test for correlations between the BBCI (Biotope Biodiversity Capacity Index) to that of the empirical estimated biodiversity indices of bird species for semi-natural grasslands in different landscapes. The study involved the use of randomly selected fourteen landscapes of bird species, each landscape of bird species observations was downloaded from Artportalen and then two analysis were applied on the data using linear regression and non-linear fitting of Michaelis Menten function to answer the research question. The results obtained suggest that with the fourteen landscapes of bird species data, it was revealed that there was a better strong positive correlation between species richness and BBCI. Moreover, the study also suggests of confirming a positive relationship between Shannon index and BBCI respectively.