Indicators for monitoring biodiversity in urban and suburban parks
城市公园和郊区公园生物多样性评估的指标

Urban and suburban parks are rich in habitats, plants and animals. With the rapid development of urbanization, biodiversity in cities and suburbs will decrease inevitably, so it is important to protect the biodiversity in parks. To achieve this goal, monitoring biodiversity is basic. Up to now, most studies on biodiversity conservation in China focus on species diversity, but few on habitat diversity. Actually, it has been proven that habitat conservation is more important than species conservation. Therefore, we introduce a method for the general monitoring of the biodiversity in urban and suburban parks developed by Hermy and Cornelis, two Belgian scholars. The method partitions diversity along two axes, habitat diversity and species diversity. At the habitat level, the diversity in so-called "habitat units" is measured. These units are divided into planar, linear and punctual elements. For each category they calculated a Shannon-Wiener diversity index and a saturation index. The latter is the ratio of the actual diversity index to the theoretical maximum diversity index in the region. At the species level, species richness and biodiversity indices of vascular plants, butterflies, amphibians and breeding birds were calculated. These values were compared with the total number of species in Flanders, resulting in a saturation index for each park for plants and animals. In this way, 20 biodiversity indicators were obtained. This method was applied to measure the biodiversity in the municipal park of Loppem (West Flanders, Belgium). We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this method, and suggest that it should be utilized, based on specific situations.