Abstract

Identifying important species in an ecosystem is of paramount importance in conservation biology. Past researches rely the concept of centrality to identify importance species as they are assumed to have disproportionate impact on the entire ecosystem. Recent advances in the identification of importance species have introduced the concept of species uniqueness. In general, unique species are those species whose positions in an ecological network are seemingly different from others. Or in ecological terminology, unique species are those species whose functional roles cannot be replaced by others. In this presentation, we review methodologies for measuring species uniqueness in the recent years and we propose further development in this particular field of research.