Punia Education Hub: Biodiversity hotspot In World

Biodiversity hotspot In World

Biodiversity hotspot

A biodiversity hotspot is a biogeographic region with significant levels of biodiversity that is threatened with destruction. For example forests are considered as biodiversity hotspots.

Norman Myers wrote about the concept in two articles in “The Environmentalist” (1988) and 1990revised after thorough analysis by Myers and others in “Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions” and a paper published in the journal Nature.

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. Around the world, 36 areas qualify under this definition. 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 Purposes

Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) is a global program that provides funding and technical assistance to nongovernmental organizations and participation to protect the Earth's richest regions of plant and animal diversity including: biodiversity hotspots, high-biodiversity wilderness areas and important marine regions.
The World Wide Fund for Nature has derived a system called the "Global 200 Ecoregions", the aim of which is to select priority Ecoregions for conservation within each of 14 terrestrial, 3 freshwater, and 4 marine habitat types. They are chosen for their species richness, endemism, taxonomic uniqueness, unusual ecological or evolutionary phenomena, and global rarity. All biodiversity hotspots contain at least one Global 200 Ecoregion.
Birdlife International has identified 218 “Endemic Bird Areas” (EBAs) each of which hold two or more bird species found nowhere else. Birdlife International has identified more than 11,000 Important Bird Areas all over the world.
Plant life International coordinates several the world aiming to identify Important Plant Areas.
Alliance for Zero Extinction is an initiative of a large number of scientific organizations and conservation groups who co-operate to focus on the most threatened endemic species of the world. They have identified 595 sites, including a large number of Birdlife’ s Important Bird Areas.
The National Geographic Society has prepared a world map of the hotspots and ArcView shapefile and metadata for the Biodiversity Hotspots including details of the individual endangered fauna in each hotspot, which is available from Conservation International

Distribution by region

North and Central America

California Floristic Province
Madrean pine-oak woodlands
Mesoamerica
North American Coastal Plain (composed of Atlantic Coastal Plain and Gulf Coastal Plain)

The Caribbean