Biodiversity hotspots: A shortcut for a more complicated concept
By C. Marchese. 2015
476 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In an era of human activities, global environmental changes, habitat loss and species extinction, conservation strategies are a crucial step toward minimizing biodiversity loss. For instance, oceans acidification and land use are intensifying in many places with negative and often irreversible consequences for biodiversity. Biodiversity hotspots, despite some criticism, have become a tool for setting conservation priorities and play an important role in decision-making for cost-effective strategies to preserve biodiversity in terrestrial and, to some extent, marine ecosystems. This area-based approach can be applied to any geographical scale and it is considered to be one of the best approaches for maintaining a large proportion of the world’s biological diversity. However, delineating hotspots includes quantitative criteria along with subjective considerations and the risk is to neglect areas, such as coldspots, with other types of conservation value. Nowadays, it is widely acknowledged that biodiversity is much more than just the number of species in a region and a conservation strategy cannot be based merely on the number of taxa present in an ecosystem. Therefore, the idea that strongly emerges is the need to reconsider conservation priorities and to go toward an interdisciplinary approach through the creation of science-policy partnerships.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e89bfd00aaa8933cb2a5feb846e8fe20eea2c469
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Citations in the corpus
- What Are Biodiversity Hotspots? (2019, background): “The fact that these factors are widespread creates challenges for the species that manage to survive; and with an ever-changing climate and unpredictable circumstances, species that cannot resist the changing environment or move to a more suitable habitat will likely become extinct [4].”