Biodiversity hotspot

Plantlife International coordinates several the world

aiming to identify Important Plant Areas.

A biodiversity hotspot is a biogeographic region with

signicant 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: Earths Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions[3] and a paper published in
the journal Nature[4]

Alliance for Zero Extinction is an initiative of a large

number of scientic organizations and conservation
groups who co-operate to focus on the most threatened endemic species of the world. They have identied 595 sites, including a large number of Birdlife
s Important Bird Areas.

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 denition, with nine other
possible candidates. These sites support nearly 60% of
the worlds plant, bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian
species, with a very high share of those species as endemics.

The National Geographic Society has prepared a

world map[6] of the hotspots and ArcView shapele and metadata for the Biodiversity Hotspots[7] including details of the individual endangered fauna in
each hotspot, which is available from Conservation
International.[8]

2 Distribution by region

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.
Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) is a
global program that provides funding and technical assistance to nongovernmental organizations and
participation to protect the Earths richest regions Biodiversity hotspots. Original proposal in green, and added reof plant and animal diversity including: biodiver- gions in blue.
sity hotspots, high-biodiversity wilderness areas and
North and Central America
important marine regions.
The World Wide Fund for Nature has derived a sys California Floristic Province 8
tem called the "Global 200 Ecoregions", the aim of
Madrean pine-oak woodlands 26
which is to select priority Ecoregions for conservation within each of 14 terrestrial, 3 freshwater, and
Mesoamerica 2
4 marine habitat types. They are chosen for their
species richness, endemism, taxonomic uniqueness,
The Caribbean
unusual ecological or evolutionary phenomena, and
global rarity. All biodiversity hotspots contain at
Caribbean Islands 3
least one Global 200 Ecoregion.
Birdlife International has identied 218 Endemic South America
Bird Areas (EBAs) each of which hold two or more
bird species found nowhere else. Birdlife Interna Atlantic Forest 4
tional has identied more than 11,000 Important
Cerrado 6
Bird Areas[5] all over the world.
1

4 SEE ALSO
Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests 7
Tumbes-Choc-Magdalena 5
Tropical Andes 1

Europe
Mediterranean Basin 14
Africa
Cape Floristic Region 12
Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa 10
Eastern Afromontane 28
Guinean Forests of West Africa 11
Horn of Africa 29
Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands 9
Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany 27
Succulent Karoo 13
Central Asia
Mountains of Central Asia 31
South Asia
Eastern Himalaya, Nepal 32
Indo-Burma, India and Myanmar 19
Western Ghats, India21
Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka21
South East Asia and Asia-Pacic
East Melanesian Islands 34
New Caledonia 23
New Zealand 24
Philippines 18
Polynesia-Micronesia 25
Southwest Australia 22

3 Critiques of hotspots
The high prole of the biodiversity hotspots approach
has resulted in some criticism. Papers such as Kareiva
& Marvier (2003)[9] have argued that the biodiversity
hotspots:
Do not adequately represent other forms of species
richness (e.g. total species richness or threatened
species richness).
Do not adequately represent taxa other than vascular
plants (e.g. vertebrates, or fungi).
Do not protect smaller scale richness hotspots.
Do not make allowances for changing land use patterns. Hotspots represent regions that have experienced considerable habitat loss, but this does not
mean they are experiencing ongoing habitat loss. On
the other hand, regions that are relatively intact (e.g.
the Amazon Basin) have experienced relatively little
land loss, but are currently losing habitat at tremendous rates.
Do not protect ecosystem services.
Do not consider phylogenetic diversity.[10]
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 identied 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 dierence. However, the available resources for
conservation also tend to vary in this way.

4 See also

Sundaland 16

Biodiversity

Wallacea 17

Conservation biology

East Asia

Crisis Ecoregions

Japan 33

Ecoregions

Mountains of Southwest China 20

Global 200

West Asia

Hawaiian honeycreeper conservation

Caucasus 15

High-Biodiversity Wilderness Areas

Irano-Anatolian 30

Hope spot: biodiversity hotspots in the open sea

3
Megadiverse countries
Protected Areas
Key Biodiversity Areas
Wilderness

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: Earths Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions, Conservation International, 2000 ISBN 978-968-6397-58-1
[4] Myers, N. et al. Nature (journal) 403, 853858 (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
Myers, N., R. A. Mittermeier, C. G. Mittermeier,
G. A. B. da Fonseca, and J. Kent. 2000. Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature
403:853-858

External links
A-Z of Areas of Biodiversity Importance: Biodiversity Hotspots
Conservation Internationals Biodiversity Hotspots
project
African Wild Dog Conservancys Biodiversity
Hotspots Project
Biodiversity hotspots in India
New biodiversity maps color-coded to show hotspots

7 Further reading
Dedicated issue of Philosophical Transactions B on
Biodiversity Hotspots. Some articles are freely
available.
Spyros Sfenthourakis, Anastasios Legakis: Hotspots
of endemic terrestrial invertebrates in Southern
Greece. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001

8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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