Practice question

Gamma diversity is the total diversity of a region or landscape containing multiple local communities. It is therefore a regional-level measure, not a community-level one. Within a single community, alpha diversity can be described through species richness, evenness, or composite indices such as Shannon or Simpson diversity. Both “evenness” and “species richness” among the alternatives are legitimate community-level attributes: richness counts species, whereas evenness describes how equally individuals are distributed among them. Beta diversity then captures turnover between communities, and gamma diversity pools diversity across the broader region. The keyed choice D conflicts with this accepted spatial hierarchy and also fails the stem because gamma is explicitly larger-scale. This is a demonstrable key mismatch, compounded by the presence of more than one plausible community-level alternative. The scientifically sound correction would require rewriting the stem—for example, asking for a regional measure, which would make gamma unambiguous—or replacing the choices with alpha, beta, gamma, and another scale. The workbook key should remain untouched as instructed, but learners should not internalize gamma diversity as a within-community metric.