Interesting biodiversity news

More hotspots than previously thought.... By the way, I've been doing some research on biodiversity / genetic diversity and bioprospecting and will have a post on some of the problems here shortly. For now, check out this article from The Indpendent:

Life on earth is not evenly spread. Some areas are richer than others, particularly tropical rainforests. Such patchy distribution inspired conservationists to draw up a list of "hotspots" where the species diversity was greater than normal. If we could concentrate our conservation efforts here, so the theory went, we might be able to stem the rapid rate of extinctions.

It was a reasonable assumption. A hotspot with the greatest biodiversity is also likely to be at the greatest risk of species loss. New research, however, does not completely support the central tenets behind hotspot ecology, and instead raises questions about how wise it is to focus conservation on them.

A study has drawn up the first detailed global map of the world's bird species. It reveals that the areas where most avian species can be found do not always overlap with the areas where they are most threatened. Professor Ian Owens of Imperial College London, who led the study published in the journal Nature last month, says that in terms of species richness, the world's bird hotspots are in the mountains of South America and Africa, but in terms of extinction risk they are in Madagascar, New Zealand and the Philippines.

"In the past, people thought that all types of biodiversity showed the same sort of pattern, but that was based on small-scale analyses," he says. "Different types of diversity don't map in the same way. A variety of mechanisms are therefore responsible biodiversity, and this points to the need to base conservation on more than one measure."

The study carried out by the scientists looked at three different measures of diversity. These were species richness, the richness of threatened species - a measure of extinction risk - and the number of endemicspecies in the region (those that do not breed or can't be found elsewhere). To their surprise, the researchers found that the measures only overlapped to a significant extent in the Andes.