The preserve is home to numerous threatened or endangered species (including about 30 to 35 Florida panthers) considered "indicator species" -- indicating the ecosystem, here Big Cypress, is sick.
Bees are also an indicator species -- meaning their presence, absence, and their well-being is indicative of the health of our environment as a whole.
Rape jokes are what an evolutionary biologist might call an indicator species.
Insects in the fossil record, as in the modern world, are important indicator species.
"Typically, an indicator species is among the smaller creatures in the environment, micro-organisms.
However, in their role as pollinators of wild flowers and other flowering plants, bees play an even more important, albeit less quantifiable, role as keystone indicator species.
Gil Penalosa, who runs Toronto-based consultancy 8-80 Cities, describes women cyclists as the "indicator species" for how bike-friendly a city is.
But more than that, they are important because they are an indicator species: "If things go wrong, they will go wrong first with the sea trout".
As a result, the bristlecone pine is considered by many dendrochronologists to be an "indicator species" for climate change.
Indicator Species Analysis was applied to determine indicator species for the different groups (Dufrene and Legendre 1997).
Both had at least one significant indicator species for every class, leaving zero classes without an indicator species.
