Megadiverse

High rates of conversion [of natural habitats to agriculture] have clear implications for biodiversity loss. Of special concern are rates of conversion in the so-called megadiverse states: areas identified as being of high species endemism.

Mexico is one of the 12 megadiverse countries. While 1.3% of the land in the world, it hosts about 12% of the known terrestrial biota with very high endemicity.

[…] Australia is the only developed nation, with the exception of Mexico, among the dozen or so regions which have been recognized as ‘megadiverse’, that is, having extensive total biodiversity.

Pioneering global cross-mappings of the distributions of biodiversity and linguistic diversity (taken as a proxy for cultural diversity as a whole) provided independent support for this conclusion, revealing significant geographic overlaps between the two diversities, especially in the tropics, and a strong coincidence between biologically and linguistically megadiverse countries[…].

In megadiverse regions such as the Andes-Amazon, managing these matters and developing wise programs for conserving natural resources is a huge undertaking, requiring the efforts of an array of individuals with widely diverse expertise.

This method is applied to the case of New Caledonia, a megadiverse island with all locations equally rich in microendemic species and where phylogenetic diversity is especially helpful to determine conservation priorities among sites.

South Africa, covering only 0.8% of the earth's terrestrial area, is one of the planet's 18 "megadiverse countries", defined by Conservation International as nations that harbour the majority of Earth's species and high numbers of endemic species.

Countries from the global south, including Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – mega-diverse countries home to the world’s three largest rainforests – wanted governments to agree to the creation of a new biodiversity fund as part of the Montreal pact to pay for new conservation targets.