We are so interrelated that these life systems underpin vital ecological processes. We have already lost vast areas of natural life and we are becoming worried for very good reason. Accordingly, all eyes are turned to saving what is left, prioritizing those areas with the heaviest or the most unique concentration of life, the biodiversity hotspots.
Naturally, animal and plant life go hand-in-hand. The United Nations Council for Biological Diversity and the several partnerships and organizations working to preserve and restore biodiversity hotspots share databases and hence are in agreement on where these areas are.
List Of Biodiversity Hotspots In India Pdf Free
Let there be no mistake. We are in imminent danger of losing a significant portion of life on our planet. Overall, biodiversity hotspots have lost around 86 percent of their original habitat already. And once a large percentage of an ecosystem is extinguished, it is no longer resilient. The rest of its life falls like dominoes.
The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) is an organization whose goals are aligned with achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and who also contribute to the database of information. While different governments and businesses have pledged to support biodiversity, CEPF in a partnership with governments, NGOs and the World Bank reaches out to civil society, to the indigenous peoples surrounding a hotspot that needs protected and revitalized and assists their efforts. Consistent with the data gathered globally, the CEPF has identified thirty-six hotspots.
For example, the entire island of Japan is a biological hotspot. Japan covers nearly 378,000 square kilometers and is home to about 126 million and a half people. The biodiversity restoration will necessarily involve greening of urban spaces, sustainable food production processes, stepping up the use of fossil fuel free vehicles and home energy and will look very different from more agrarian restoration efforts than in, for example, the more sparsely populated and less developed areas in the mountains of central Asia.
BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global "biodiversity community."
As you might guess from the title - I only list free GIS datasets here. That word is rather ambiguous (just ask Richard Stallman!), but here I use the meaning of 'free as in beer', and I include sites that provide data free for non-commercial purposes. Funnily enough, given the title, I don't link to datasets that cost money!
Sunderbans forests, locally known as Badabon, are one of the richest biodiversity hotspots in India. This UNESCO World Heritage site is known for its mangroves, coastal forests that serve as a biological buffer between the land and sea. The unique ecosystem is famous for the royal Bengal tiger, Gangetic dolphin, and estuarine crocodile. It also provides shelter to a large variety of birds, fishes, spiders, reptiles, oysters, and crabs. The forest forms a part of the Ganga Brahmaputra delta, spread across 26,000 square kilometers and distributed amongst 104 islands.
Abstract:The global challenges of food security and biodiversity are rarely addressed together, though recently there has been an increasing awareness that the two issues are closely related. The majority of land available for agriculture is already used for food production, but despite the productivity gains, one in nine people worldwide are classified as food insecure. There is an increasing risk that addressing food insecurity through methods such as agricultural expansion or intensification could lead to biodiversity loss through destruction of habitats important for conservation. This analysis uses various indicators of biodiversity at a global scale, including biodiversity hotspots, total species richness, and threatened and endemic species richness. Areas where high biodiversity coexists with high food insecurity or a high risk of agricultural expansion, were examined and found to mainly occur in the tropics, with Madagascar standing out in particular. The areas identified are especially at risk of biodiversity loss, and so are global priorities for further research and for policy development to address food insecurity and biodiversity loss together.Keywords: biodiversity conservation; food security; land use
Mediterranean wildlife and habitats are very specific as the region was not affected by the last Ice Age. The rate of endemism is exceptionally high. The Mediterranean is one of the world's top biodiversity hotspots.
Some of these organisms are permanent residents in seagrass meadows, while others are temporary visitors. A single acre of seagrass can support upwards of 40,000 fish and 50 million small invertebrates, and there are often tens to hundreds more animals in a seagrass bed compared to adjacent bare sandy areas. Hundreds of species live in the seagrass near the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce in Florida. A number of the species that depend on seagrasses are important for commercial and recreational fisheries. In fact, in all regions of the world fishermen will specifically seek out seagrass beds for their abundance of fish. It is because of the wide variety of different species that live amongst the grasses that seagrass beds often form important "biodiversity hotspots." Not only do seagrasses support a diversity of marine life, but populations of a given seagrass species can themselves be very genetically diverse and this diversity itself is linked to higher animal abundances. Understanding how seagrass genotypic diversity does this is an active area of research.
Unfortunately, seagrasses are in trouble. Seagrass coverage is being lost globally at a rate of 1.5 percent per year. That amounts to about 2 football fields of seagrass lost each hour. It's estimated that 29 percent of seagrass meadows have died off in the past century. In a 2011 assessment, nearly one quarter of all seagrass species for which information was adequate to judge were threatened (endangered or vulnerable) or near threatened using the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List criteria. This is especially worrying because seagrass losses are projected to have severe impacts on marine biodiversity, the health of other marine ecosystems, and on human livelihoods. Additionally, some threatened marine species such as sea turtles and marine mammals live in seagrass habitats and rely on them for food. For every seagrass species there is on average more than one associated threatened marine species. In fact, the only marine plant listed as endangered in the United States is a seagrass (Halophila johnsonii) found in Florida. 2ff7e9595c
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