Biodiversity hotspot

A biodiversity hotspot is a biogeographic region with significant levels of biodiversity that is under threat from humans. Norman Myers wrote about the concept in two articles in “The Environmentalist” (1988),[1] & 1990[2] revised after thorough analysis by Myers and others in “Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions”[3] and a paper published in the journal Nature[4]

To qualify as a biodiversity hotspot on Myers 2000 edition of the hotspot-map, a region must meet two strict criteria: it must contain at least 0.5% or 1,500 species of vascular plants as endemics, and it has to have lost at least 70% of its primary vegetation.[4] Around the world, 34 areas qualify under this definition, with nine other possible candidates. These sites support nearly 60% of the world's plant, bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian species, with a very high share of those species as endemics.

Hotspot conservation initiatives

Only a small percentage of the total land area within biodiversity hotspots is now protected. Several international organizations are working in many ways to conserve biodiversity hotspots.

Distribution by region

Biodiversity hotspots. Original proposal in green, and added regions in blue.

North and Central America

The Caribbean

South America

Europe

Africa

Central Asia

South Asia

South East Asia and Asia-Pacific

East Asia

West Asia

Critiques of hotspots

The high profile of the biodiversity hotspots approach has resulted in some criticism. Papers such as Kareiva & Marvier (2003)[9] have argued that the biodiversity hotspots:

A recent series of papers has pointed out that biodiversity hotspots (and many other priority region sets) do not address the concept of cost.[11] The purpose of biodiversity hotspots is not simply to identify regions that are of high biodiversity value, but to prioritize conservation spending. The regions identified include some in the developed world (e.g. the California Floristic Province), alongside others in the developing world (e.g. Madagascar). The cost of land is likely to vary between these regions by an order of magnitude or more, but the biodiversity hotspot designations do not consider the conservation importance of this difference. However, the available resources for conservation also tend to vary in this way.

See also

References

  1. Myers, N. The Environmentalist 8 187-208 (1988)
  2. Myers, N. The Environmentalist 10 243-256 (1990)
  3. Russell A. Mittermeier, Norman Myers and Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier, Hotspots: Earth's Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions, Conservation International, 2000 ISBN 978-968-6397-58-1
  4. 1 2 Myers, N. et al. Nature (journal) 403, 853–858 (2000)
  5. Archived August 8, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  6. "Conservation International" (PDF). The Biodiversity Hotspots. 2010-10-07. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  7. "Conservation International". The Biodiversity Hotspots. 2010-10-07. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  8. "Resources". Biodiversityhotspots.org. 2010-10-07. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  9. Kareiva, P. and M. Marvier (2003) Conserving Biodiversity Coldspots, American Scientist, 91, 344-351.
  10. Daru, Barnabas H.; van der Bank, Michelle; Davies, T. Jonathan (2014). "Spatial incongruence among hotspots and complementary areas of tree diversity in southern Africa". Diversity and Distributions. doi:10.1111/ddi.12290.
  11. Possingham, H. and K. Wilson (2005) Turning up the heat on hotspots, Nature, 436, 919-920.
General references

External links

Further reading

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