Peer Review

What is Biodiversity

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Mar 14, 2025 by Biology

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

This OER textbook provides an overview of what is meant by the term ‘biodiversity,’ and how we measure it. The text consists of a series of topics including global processes; levels of biodiversity; the ‘biodiversity hierarchy’; genetic and phenotypic diversity; population diversity; species diversity; community diversity; ecosystem diversity; landscape diversity; historical and ecological biogeographic diversity; a brief history of life on earth; ecological value.

"What is Biodiversity" is a collection of chapters assembled by Nora Bynum. Five authors have contributed in this work and the book has been designed in 18 chapters and 70 pages.

Type of Material:

Open (Access) Textbook

Recommended Uses:

It can serve as a texbook in Biodiversity, or when in a Biology course, can serve as one of references when covering biodiversity content. It can also be used in an online teaching format to provide self-paced reading materials for students.

Technical Requirements:

Access to the Internet and a web browser. FireFox browser, ver. 89.0.2. works. PDF version of this book is also available which needs Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

None given. The main goal appears to be to survey and provide a resource on biodiversity.

Target Student Population:

High School, College Lower Division students.

People outside academia can also benefit from this book's content.

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

General Biology at the high school level.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The content is accurate and presented clearly
The coverage includes the most important topics in biodiversity
Key words are defined
Some in-text citations are provided
Chapters are organized logically
All quotations have been referenced and a thorough list of references is available

Concerns:

The text does not appear to have been updated since 2009
Few images, diagrams, graphs, or tables are provided to present and enhance content
Some chapter are excessively cursory, leaving out significant details
The reference section (including the references corresponding to the in-text citations) is missing
Some chapetrs could be merged together, since they are intrerelated. Right now we have chapers about half to one page

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

The text has a downloadable PDF version or can be viewed online
Students and other users can open it up on any device and read the content without any need for a hardcopy version
A glossary and index are provided
Key words in the text are hyperlinked to the glossary
A few key concepts or terms (linked to the glossary entry) are provided at the end of each chapter
A nice activity using spider diversity is provided
The text is OER, creative commons, and therefore free to students
Some chapters have subchapters using a decimal system (1.1, 1.2, etc.)

Concerns:

No objectives or goals are given in the chapters (except chapter 5)
The text might benefit from grouping chapters into larger units
The excessively brief treatment of some topics renders this text more of a "bare-bones" overview than a complete textbook for a college class
No introduction is provided in the text

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

A clickable table of contents is provided in the online version
The text is easy to navigate
A search function allows the text to be searched easily
Clicking on a term will take you to the chapter's Glossary of new terms for further explanation

Concerns:

The PDF has no clickable table of contents
A few hyperlinks were not working and apparently linked to materials in a previous incarnation of the content
The references provided were hyperlinked, but all of the links were broken

Other Issues and Comments:

The current version dated February 5th, 2009 and it does not look that the material hasbeen updated since then.

This text is part of CNX, which is due to be retired in January of 2022. A Libretext version of this text exists, that might be a more suitable place to send students.

Creative Commons: