ancient Greek: bios life, metron measure) refers to two very different fields of study and application. The first, which is the older and is used in biological studies, including forestry, is the collection, synthesis, analysis and management of quantitative data on biological communities such as forests. Biometrics in reference to biological sciences has been studied and applied for several generations and is somewhat simply viewed as "biological statistics." More recently and incongruently, the term's meaning has been broadened to include the study of methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.