 |
 |
 |
| Database on state of environment, Kerala |
About Kerala 
|
| Resources
|
| Environment
|
| Agro_industries
|
| Commerce
|
| Pollution
|
| ISBEID:Biodiversity |
|
Plant Species |
|
Animal Species |
| Biodiversity: Information |
Links
   
 National Biodiversity Action Plan - Download PDF as file (78 pages, 6.55 MB)Fauna statistics: World, India and Kerala |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
News from media
Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth. It includes the variability of species in terrestrial, aerial and aquatic habitats, the diversity of ecosystems and
Over the ages, human race used plants and animals as icons to establish cultural identity. The aesthetic value of biodiversity is better realised and it could not be valued ideally with the current economic valuation models. Of late, biodiversity is more reckoned for its unbelievable potential for supplying novel genes for a variety of applications in biotechnology and pharmacology. The Convention on Biological Diversity, of which India is a signatory, advocates that
Biodiversity is not distributed uniformly over the earth. Some areas, particularly along the tropics, are rich in species. Many species in these areas are threatened with extinction. However, the fund for conservation is rather limited and hence it is important to fix priority areas of conservation. In 1988 British ecologist, Norman Myres forwarded a concept called hotspots to identify the most major criteria for designating an area as hotspot are : (i) richness in endemic species, and (ii) impact by human activities. Endemic species are those restricted to certain localized areas of the earth. Evolutionary history has endowed species with ecological characteristics that respond to the environment they inhabit. However, most species are rare and restricted, because their ecological requirements are only met over by a small area and because they are not capable of dispersing great distances to other suitable habitats.
Plant diversity is the biological basis for hotspot designation. To qualify as a hotspot, a region must support 1,500 endemic plant species, 0.5 percent of the global total. Existing primary vegetation is the basis for assessing human impact in a region; to qualify as a hotspot, a region must have lost more than 70 percent of its original habitat. Identification of hotspot would help pin pointing priority areas for conservation. According to the classification of Norman Myres' there are 25 hotspots scattered in different parts of the world. Even though the 25 biodiversity hotspots together represent 1.4 percent of the earth's land area, they contain 44 percent of all plant species and 35 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate species in the world. Each of these hotspots is under severe pressure due to anthropogenic interventions and has already lost at least 70 percent of its original natural vegetation. India is part of two hotspots- Indo-Burma (earlier Eastern Himalayas ) and Western Ghats and Sri Lanka .
The area covered by Indo-Burma hotspot can be described as tropical Asia East of the Ganges-Brahmaputhra lowlands, excluding the Malesian region. The Indo-Burma Hotspot begins at the evergreen forests in the foothills of Chittagong in Bangladesh and extends through the Garo and Khasi Hills of Meghalaya in India, then eastwards through Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland to encompass most of Myanmar (except the extreme northern alpine areas), a part of southern and western Yunnan, China, all of Lao People's Democratic republic (P.D.R), Vietnam and Cambodia, the coastal lowlands of southern China, Hainan island, the vast majority of Thailand, a small fraction of Peninsular Malaysia, and the Andaman Islands of India. As defined, the hotspot covered 2,373,000 squares kilometre.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
References
|
Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment
Thiruvananthapuram