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From biodiversity + hotspot. The word hotspot to describe such regions appears to have been first used by the British environmentalist Norman Myers (1934–2019) in a 1988 article in The Environmentalist.[1]
Conservationists are far from able to assist all species under threat, if only for lack of funding. This places a premium on priorities: how can we support the most species at the least cost? One way is to identify ‘biodiversity hotspots’ where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat.
Usage notes
In the writings of Norman Myers and his collaborators, a biodiversity hotspot is defined as a region that contains at least 1,500 endemicspecies of vascular plants (more than 0.5% of the world’s total), and which has lost at least 70% of its primary vegetation.[2]
This paper proposes that we can identify a number of localities in tropical forests that; a) feature exceptional concentrations of species with exceptional levels of endemism, and that, b) face exceptional degrees of threat. These “hotspot” areas, 10 of which are identified in this paper, total only 292 000 km² (3.5 percent) of a biome of 8.5 million km² of primary forest remaining.