Biological diversity: Islands beat mainland nine to one
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - 06:56
in Earth & Climate
The islands located in the oceans are around nine times as valuable as an equally large piece of mainland for maintaining global biological diversity. Researchers at the University of Bonn have come to this conclusion in a recent joint project carried out with colleagues from the University of California San Diego and the University of Applied Sciences Eberswalde. For this they compiled the largest collection of data on the global occurrence of plant and vertebrate animal species. On this basis they calculated an index reflecting the number of species and their rarity. They have presented the results in the form of world maps. The study will be published in the next edition of the renowned US journal PNAS...
