Species-area curve in the context of "Habitat destruction"

Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area. Phytogeography is the branch of biogeography that studies the distribution of plants, Zoogeography is the branch that studies distribution of animals, while Mycogeography is the branch that studies distribution of fungi, such as mushrooms.

Knowledge of spatial variation in the numbers and types of organisms is as vital to us today as it was to our early human ancestors, as we adapt to heterogeneous but geographically predictable environments. Biogeography is an integrative field of inquiry that unites concepts and information from ecology, evolutionary biology, taxonomy, geology, physical geography, palaeontology, and climatology.

In ecology, the species discovery curve (also known as a species accumulation curve or collector's curve) is a graph recording the cumulative number of species of living things recorded in a particular environment as a function of the cumulative effort expended searching for them (usually measured in person-hours). It is related to, but not identical with, the species-area curve.

The species discovery curve will necessarily be increasing, and will normally be negatively accelerated (that is, its rate of increase will slow down). Plotting the curve gives a way of estimating the number of additional species that will be discovered with further effort. This is usually done by fitting some kind of functional form to the curve, either by eye or by using non-linear regression techniques. Commonly used functional forms include the logarithmic function and the negative exponential function. The advantage of the negative exponential function is that it tends to an asymptote which equals the number of species that would be discovered if infinite effort is expended. However, some theoretical approaches imply that the logarithmic curve may be more appropriate, implying that though species discovery will slow down with increasing effort, it will never entirely cease, so there is no asymptote, and if infinite effort was expended, an infinite number of species would be discovered. An example in which one would not expect the function to asymptote is in the study of genetic sequences where new mutations and sequencing errors may lead to infinite variants.