Natural History Wanderings

Conservation Magazine has an article on desert biodiversity

California, or rather the California Floristic Province, is a global biodiversity hotspot. That means it hosts an incredibly large number of species of plants and animals found nowhere else on the planet. It is also threatened by environmental degradation. The same is true of the Tropical Andes, Brazil’s Cerrado, the island of Madagascar, and the mountains of Central Asia, a range the early Persians referred to as the “roof of the world.” Notably absent from most lists of biodiversity hotspots? Deserts.

At first, that is perhaps understandable. Deserts are typically thought of as lifeless wastelands, low in diversity both of plants and of animals. Life requires water, and deserts don’t have much. But the truth is that deserts teem with life, if you know where to look, and, critically, when to look. The problem with most common approaches to identifying biodiversity hotspots is that they are defined at the global or continental levels. While deserts can be home to a tremendous amount of endemic species, they’re usually clustered in very small localities, often around ephemeral sources of water.

Read story at Deserts teem with biodiversity, if you know where to look – Conservation.