What is biodiversity hotspot? Why is India considered as a mega biodiversity hotspot?

 Hot spots are areas that are extremely rich in species, have high endemism and are under constant threat.

Myers (1988) identified 18 regions or “Hot spots” around the world. Interestingly these areas contain nearly 50,000 endemic plant species, or 20% of the world’s plant species, in just 746,000 km2, or 0.5% of the Earth’s total land surface.

 India is one of the mega-diversity countries because -

·         Four hot spots out of 34 global biodiversity hot spots are in India with itsneighbouring countries.

·         The endemics of Indian biodiversity is high.About 33% of the recorded flora is endemic to the country. Of the 49,219 plant species, 5150 are endemic and distributed into 141 genera under 47 families corresponding to about 30% of the world’s recorded flora.

·         India has 26 recognised endemism centres that are home to nearly a third of all the flowering plants identified and described to date in the country.

·         India has two major realms called the Palaeretic and the Indo-Malayan and three biomes i.e. tropical humid forests, tropical deciduous forests and the warm deserts/semi-deserts.

·         Indiahas tenbiogeographic regions.

·         India is one of the 12 centres of origin of cultivated plants.

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