Hotspots: Concept of hot spots was developed to designate priority areas for In-situ conservation. The hot spots are richest and the most threatened reservoirs of plant and animal life on earth. The key criteria for determining a hot spot are:
Very high levels of species richness.
High degree of endemism (species confined to that region and not found anywhere else).
3)Degree of threat, which is measured in terms of habitat loss.
Initially 25 hot spots were identified globally. But now the number is raised to 34 with earth’s land area of less than 2%. The number of species they collectively harbor is extremely high and strict protection of these hot spots could reduce the ongoing mass extinctions by almost 30 %.
India has three hotspots –
Western Ghats and Sri Lanka
Indo–Burma and
Himalaya, and these extend into the neighbouring countries also.