Between 1992 and 2015, the world’s most biologically diverse places lost an area more than three times the size of Sweden when the land was converted to other uses, mainly agriculture, or gobbled up by urban sprawl.
Between 1992 and 2015, the world’s most biologically diverse places lost an area more than three times the size of Sweden when the land was converted to other uses, mainly agriculture, or gobbled up by urban sprawl.
These losses all occurred in what are called “biodiversity hotspots”, or 34 areas scattered across the globe that contain “exceptional concentrations of endemic species that were undergoing exceptional loss of habitat,” according to the originators of the idea. To be considered a hotspot, an area must have already lost as much as 70 per cent of its primary vegetation and yet still remain home to least 1500 species of plants found nowhere else on Earth.
When the concept of a biological hotspot was first introduced in 2000, the idea was that governments and land managers could focus their conservation efforts on the areas, because protecting them would protect the greatest number of species in the most at-risk places.
Read more at: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Biologists have identified 34 areas on the globe where biodiversity is both extremely high and at risk. (Photo Credit: Francesco Cherubini/NTNU)
