LOOKING for a sound investment to combat the biodiversity crisis? Spend your cash on an island. It turns out they are about nine times as valuable as an equally large piece of mainland. So says the first worldwide analysis of the importance of different regions for maintaining global biodiversity.
While it is common knowledge that islands generally house ahigh number of species that live only in that location, the total diversity of life on most islands is relatively low compared with mainland areas. As a result, their importance for conservation efforts hasn't been clear, says a team from the Universities of Bonn and Eberswalde, Germany, and the University of California, San Diego.
To settle this question, they calculated a new combined index which takes into account both the number of unique species in a given region and the total number of different species living ...
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