CONCEPTUAL ROOTS. “The multi-cellular eukaryote concepts of “species” and “individual” are deeply embedded in most efforts to characterize and measure biodiversity. Most multi-cellular eukaryote diversity metrics are defined in terms of “species diversity” over some spatio-temporal range, and much raw biodiversity-measurement data consists of observations of the occurrence of a single individual of a particular species at a specific point in space and time.”
https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8