Some researchers from University of Bonn, UC San Diego and the University of Applied Sciences Eberswalde have published a research paper that finds islands contain a disproportionate fraction of all the unique and unusual species on the planet. Think of islands as evolutionary time capsules. Treasure and protect them.
The southwest Pacific island of New Caledonia stands out as the most unique with animals like the kagu, a bird with no close relatives found only in the forested highlands that is in danger of extinction, and plants like Amborella, a small understory shrub unlike any other flowering plant that is thought to be the lone survivor of an ancient lineage.
Fragments of continents that have broken free to become islands like Madagascar and New Caledonia often serve as a final refuge for evolutionary relicts like these. The source of diversity is different on younger archipelagos formed by volcanoes such as the Canary Islands, the Galápagos and Hawaii which offered pristine environments where early colonizers branched out into multiple related new species to fill empty environmental niches. The new measure doesn't distinguish between the two sources of uniqueness, which may merit different conservation strategies.
Although islands account for less than four percent of the Earth's land area, they harbor nearly a quarter of the world's plants, more than 70,000 species that don't occur on the mainlands. Vertebrate land animals – birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals – broadly follow this same pattern.
"Islands are important and should be part of any global conservation strategy," Kreft said. "Such a strategy wouldn't make any sense if you didn't include the islands."
This means we should not wipe out island rain forests in order to build palm oil plantations to create biodiesel fuel. Government-sponsored environmentalism enlisted in the cause of environmental destruction is a bad idea. Why is it even necessary to say this?
By Randall Parker at 2009 May 12 07:30 AM Trends Habitat LossMuch of the damage has already been done. So many of the world's islands have been devastated by the introduction of rats, pigs, dogs, and snakes, that I wonder how many of the island species would survive even if we did nothing further to destroy them. Did you know that there were no mosquitoes in Hawaii until we (in this case Europeans, not Polynesians, though they did plenty of other damage...) introduced them?
I think it's also worth pointing out that the diversity of species on islands is not so much a remnant of previously existing mainland diversity, with islands acting as refugia. Rather, the isolation of the island allows for further speciation; maybe the most dramatic example of this is Madagascar.
Good Topic/post. The potentiality and uniqueness of some of the things on these islands is something worth ensuring stays safe, as well as studied.
Xenophobes. No species is an island. Contaminationism rules.