BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOTS

North and Central America


California Floristic Province

Caribbean Islands

Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands

Mesoamerica
 
South America


Atlantic Forest

Cerrado

Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena

Tropical Andes




Europe and Central Asia


Caucasus

Irano-Anatolian

Mediterranean Basin

Mountains of Central Asia
 
 
Africa


Cape Floristic Region

Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa

Eastern Afromontane

Guinean Forests of West Africa

Horn of Africa

Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands

Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany

Succulent Karoo

 
 
 
Asia-Pacific


East Melanesian Islands

Himalaya

Indo-Burma

Japan

Mountains of Southwest China

New Caledonia

New Zealand

Philippines

Polynesia-Micronesia

Southwest Australia

Sundaland

Wallacea

Western Ghats and Sri Lanka
 
HOTSPOTS SCIENCE




Life on Earth faces a crisis of historical and planetary proportions. Unsustainable consumption in many northern countries and crushing poverty in the tropics are destroying wild nature. Biodiversity is besieged.





Extinction is the gravest aspect of the biodiversity crisis: it is irreversible. While extinction is a natural process, human impacts have elevated the rate of extinction by at least a thousand, possibly several thousand, times the natural rate. Mass extinctions of this magnitude have only occurred five times in the history of our planet; the last brought the end of the dinosaur age.





In a world where conservation budgets are insufficient given the number of species threatened with extinction, identifying conservation priorities is crucial. British ecologist Norman Myers defined the biodiversity hotspot concept in 1988 to address the dilemma that conservationists face: what areas are the most immediately important for conserving biodiversity?





The biodiversity hotspots hold especially high numbers of endemic species, yet their combined area of remaining habitat covers only 2.3 percent of the Earth's land surface. Each hotspot faces extreme threats and has already lost at least 70 percent of its original natural vegetation. Over 50 percent of the world’s plant species and 42 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate species are endemic to the 34 biodiversity hotspots.

 
 
HOTSPOTS DEFINED




A seminal paper by Norman Myers in 1988 first identified ten tropical forest “hotspots” characterized both by exceptional levels of plant endemism and by serious levels of habitat loss. In 1990 Myers added a further eight hotspots, including four Mediterranean-type ecosystems. Conservation International adopted Myers’ hotspots as its institutional blueprint in 1989, and in 1996, the organization made the decision to undertake a reassessment of the hotspots concept, including an examination of whether key areas had been overlooked. Three years later an extensive global review was undertaken, which introduced quantitative thresholds for the designation of biodiversity hotspots:





To qualify as a hotspot, a region must meet two strict criteria: it must contain at least 1,500 species of vascular plants (> 0.5 percent of the world’s total) as endemics, and it has to have lost at least 70 percent of its original habitat.





In the 1999 analysis, published in the book Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions, and a year later in the scientific journal Nature (Myers, et al. 2000), 25 biodiversity hotspots were identified. Collectively, these areas held as endemics no less than 44 percent of the world’s plants and 35 percent of terrestrial vertebrates in an area that formerly covered only 11.8 percent of the planet’s land surface. The habitat extent of this land area had been reduced by 87.8 percent of its original extent, such that this wealth of biodiversity was restricted to only 1.4 percent of Earth’s land surface.