Q.Which of the following group exhibit more species diversity?

Let’s begin with something you already know from everyday life.

Imagine you walk into a large, busy market. You see different kinds of shops: a fruit seller, a tailor, a tea stall, a bookshop, a mobile repair kiosk. Now, if someone asks you, “How many types of shops are there in this market?” you would count the distinct categories — fruit, tailoring, tea, books, mobile repair — and say “five types.” That count of distinct types is, in a very rough sense, what ecologists call species richness.

Now take that same market and imagine it’s a forest. Instead of shops, you have different kinds of trees, birds, insects, and fungi. The number of different species present in a given area — say, a national park or a pond — is its species richness. It is the simplest and most fundamental measure of biodiversity: just a count of how many distinct species live there.

Why does this matter? Because species richness is the first thing ecologists want to know when they study an ecosystem. A forest with 50 tree species is generally considered more biodiverse — and often more stable — than one with only 5. Governments and conservation agencies use species richness to decide which areas to protect. If a wetland has very high richness of bird species, it might be declared a bird sanctuary.

But here is the practical problem: you cannot count every single species in a large area. It is impossible to walk every square metre of a rainforest and list every beetle, moss, and frog. So ecologists use estimation — they sample a small part of the area, count the species they find there, and then use statistical methods to estimate the total richness for the whole area. That is what species richness estimation means: using data from a sample to make an educated guess about the total number of species present.

The NCERT textbook (Class 12 Biology, Chapter 15 – Biodiversity and Conservation) introduces this idea when it talks about how biodiversity is measured. It states that species richness is one of the three key components of biodiversity (the others being species evenness and genetic diversity). The textbook emphasises that tropical regions like the Amazon rainforest have much higher species richness than temperate regions — for example, a single hectare in the Amazon may contain more species of trees than the entire United Kingdom. …