Biodiversity is important for environmental stability and human well-being. The way we think about and measure biodiversity often simplifies the many kinds of biological variation among species into one type of diversity: taxonomic diversity. Other ways to examine biodiversity more directly link important features of biological diversity to ecological questions and conservation values. We examine under what conditions different kinds of diversity (i.e., species richness, phylogenetic diversity, functional diversity) vary across a landscape. Using bird biodiversity across Nebraska, we also examine what the differences among diversity types mean for ecology and conservation.