Includes sections on Polynesia and Micronesia, the California coast, the Caribbean, Choco-Darien Western Ecuador, the Mediterranean Basin, Brazilian Cerrado, Tropical Andes, Central Chile, Atlantic Forest Region, the Caucasus, the Mountains of South-Central China, India and Burma, Eastern Arc Mountains and Coastal Forests of Tanzania and Kenya, Guinean Forest of West Africa, Succulent Karoo, Cape Floristic Province, Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands, Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, Sundaland, Wallecea, Southwest Australia, the Philippines, New Caledonia, and New Zealand.

This book presents the results of the biodiversity hotspots - those discrete, biogeographic regions that are known to hold at least 1,500 plants as endemics and that have lost at least 70% of their primary native vegetation.

Biodiversity and its conservation are among the main global topics in science and politics and perhaps the major challenge for the present and coming generations. This book written by international experts from different disciplines comprises general chapters on diversity and its measurement, human impacts on biodiversity hotspots on a global scale, human diversity itself and various geographic regions exhibiting high levels of diversity. The areas covered range from genetics and taxonomy to evolutionary biology, biogeography and the social sciences. In addition to the classic hotspots in the tropics, the book also highlights various other ecosystems harbouring unique species communities including coral reefs and the Southern Ocean. The approach taken considers, but is not limited to, the original hotspot definition sensu stricto and presents a chapter introducing the 35th hotspot, the forests of East Australia. While, due to a bias in data availability, the majority of contributions on particular taxa deal with vertebrates and plants, some also deal with the less-studied invertebrates. This book will be essential reading for anyone involved with biodiversity, particularly researchers and practitioners in the fields of conservation biology, ecology and evolution.

This book aims to view and to understand Alexander von Humboldt from different perspectives and in varying disciplinary contexts. His contributions addressed numerous topics in the earth but also life sciences—spanning from geo-botany, climatology, paleontology, oceanography, mineralogy, resources, and hydrogeology to links between the environmental impact of humans, erosion, and climate change. From the very beginning, he paved the way for a modern, integrated earth system science approach to decipher, characterize, and model the different forcing factors and their feedback mechanisms. It becomes obvious that Humboldt’s holistic approach is far beyond simple description and empiric data collection. As documented and analyzed in the different texts of this volume, he combines observation and analysis with emotions and subjective perceptions in a very affectionate way. However, this publication does not intend to add another encyclopedic text compilation but to observe and critically analyze this unique personality ́s relevance in a modern context, particularly in discussing environmental and social key issues in the twenty-first century.

The future of our food depends on tiny seeds in orchards and fields the world over. In 1943, one of the first to recognize this fact, the great botanist Nikolay Vavilov, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison. But in the years before Stalin jailed him as a scapegoat for the country’s famines, Vavilov had traveled over five continents, collecting hundreds of thousands of seeds in an effort to outline the ancient centers of agricultural diversity and guard against widespread hunger. Now, another remarkable scientist—and vivid storyteller—has retraced his footsteps. In Where Our Food Comes From, Gary Paul Nabhan weaves together Vavilov’s extraordinary story with his own expeditions to Earth’s richest agricultural landscapes and the cultures that tend them. Retracing Vavilov’s path from Mexico and the Colombian Amazon to the glaciers of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, he draws a vibrant portrait of changes that have occurred since Vavilov’s time and why they matter. In his travels, Nabhan shows how climate change, free trade policies, genetic engineering, and loss of traditional knowledge are threatening our food supply. Through discussions with local farmers, visits to local outdoor markets, and comparison of his own observations in eleven countries to those recorded in Vavilov’s journals and photos, Nabhan reveals just how much diversity has already been lost. But he also shows what resilient farmers and scientists in many regions are doing to save the remaining living riches of our world. It is a cruel irony that Vavilov, a man who spent his life working to foster nutrition, ultimately died from lack of it. In telling his story, Where Our Food Comes From brings to life the intricate relationships among culture, politics, the land, and the future of the world’s food.

India’s phytodiversity is one of the most significant in the world. India is one of the twelve mega-biodiversity centers in the world and also an important center of origin of agrobiodiversity. It is therefore, very important to study, document and conserve the plant wealth of India and also of the world before its possible extinction. There are convincing scientific, economic and sociological reasons for giving priority to the conservation of the major centers of plant diversity throughout the world. The strategies to conserve the biodiversity include establishment of protected area network and corridors with emphasis on appropriate levels of management, reduction of anthropogenic pressure on natural populations by cultivating them elsewhere, programmes of augmentation, reintroduction and introduction of target taxa, restoration of degraded habitats, etc. The conservation strategies can be either, in-situ conservation of genetic resources within their ecosystem and natural habitat or ex-situ conservation of components of genetic material of biological diversity outside their natural habitat. The choice of conservation strategy depends upon the nature of the material to be conserved, i.e., the life cycle and mode of reproduction, size of individual population and ecological status. Ex-situ techniques include the establishment of botanical and zoological gardens, banks of pollen, seed tissue culture, DNA, etc. Establishment of forest reserves, national parks, protected areas and on farm conservation of valuable plant varieties is being promoted to facilitate their in-situ conservation.

This comprehensive, groundbreaking book on the biodiversity of parasites offers a clear and accessible explanation of how parasite biodiversity provides insight into the history and biogeography of other organisms, the structure of ecosystems, and the processes that lead to the diversification of life.