The second half of the last century and into the new millennium has witnessed many insights into our understanding of the concept of diversity. The first use of the term diversity was to characterize samples in terms of numbers of species (i.e., species richness), followed by how numbers of species and individuals were distributed among samples (i.e., species diversity—Fisher et al. 1943). In 1988 the term biodiversity was coined to encompass all of the different ways that life could vary on earth (Wilson 1988). Indeed, biodiversity is multifaceted and composed of numerous dimensions reflecting phylogeny, ecological form and function, ecosystem processes and services, variation in biotic interactions, and genetic variability, to name only a few (Gaston and Spicer 2004). These dimensions form gradients related to environmental and historical differences among regions of the globe (Huang et al. 2012) and are remarkably complex, even forming their own gradients in the degree to which they covary across space (Stevens and Tello 2018).

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上世纪下半叶到新千年，我们对多样性概念的理解有了很多见识。多样性一词的第一个用途是根据物种数量（即物种丰富度）表征样本，然后描述物种之间的物种和个体数量如何分布（即物种多样性，Fisher等人，1943年）。1988年，“生物多样性”一词被创造出来以涵盖地球上生活可能发生变化的所有不同方式（Wilson 1988）。的确，生物多样性是多方面的，由众多方面组成，它们反映了系统发育，生态形式和功能，生态系统过程和服务，生物相互作用的变化以及遗传变异性（仅举几例）（Gaston和Spicer 2004）。