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An ecological island is a term used in New Zealand, and increasingly in Australia, to refer to an area of land (not necessarily an actual island) isolated by natural or artificial means from the surrounding land, [1] where a natural micro-habitat exists amidst a larger differing ecosystem.
Island ecology is the study of island organisms and their interactions with each other and the environment. Islands account for nearly 1/6 of earth’s total land area, [1] yet the ecology of island ecosystems is vastly different from that of mainland communities.
Larger islands with diverse ecological niches encouraged floral and faunal adaptive radiation, whereby multiple species evolved from a common ancestor, each species adapted to a different ecological niche; the various species of Hawaiian honeycreepers (Family Drepanididae) are a classic example. Other adaptations to island ecologies include ...
This is a list of terrestrial ecoregions as compiled by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The WWF identifies terrestrial , freshwater , and marine ecoregions . The terrestrial scheme divides the Earth's land surface into 8 biogeographic realms , containing 867 smaller ecoregions.
A biogeographic realm is the broadest biogeographic division of Earth's land surface, based on distributional patterns of terrestrial organisms. They are subdivided into bioregions, which are further subdivided into ecoregions.
A map of the Amazon rainforest ecoregions. The yellow line encloses the ecoregions per the World Wide Fund for Nature. A map of the bioregions of Canada and the US. An ecoregion (ecological region) is an ecologically and geographically defined area that is smaller than a bioregion, which in turn is smaller than a biogeographic realm.
The term was used widely in scholarly literature in the 1980s and 1990s, and in 2001 scientists at the U.S. conservation organization World Wildlife Fund (WWF) codified and published the first global-scale map of Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World (TEOW), led by D. Olsen, E. Dinerstein, E. Wikramanayake, and N. Burgess. [108]
English: World map of countries shaded according to their ecological footprint in 2006 (published on 25 November 2009 by the Global Footprint Network). It is measured by the amount of global hectares that are affected by humans per capita of the country.