May 11, 2009 05:30 PM New Caledonia, a French territory in the
South Pacific, is the hottest spot on Earth for biodiversity,
says a study in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA. That island boasts a rich
array of unique plant and animal species, which are increasingly
under threat from humans. In the study, ecologist Holger Kreft
of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues
looked at what they termed "endemism richness," or the number of
unique species combined with the overall number of species
around the world. The researchers were surprised to find that
islands from Micronesia to the Atlantic—just 3.6 percent of the
surface of the planet—boasted plant endemism richness 9.5 times
higher than the continents and more than 8 times higher for
animals with backbones. "Islands should have their place in
global conservation strategies because islands harbor such
unique flora and fauna, which cannot be protected elsewhere,"
Kreft says. The 70,000 unique speci