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The Adaptational Diversity of Desert Biota

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

John L. Cloudsley-Thompson
Affiliation:
(Emeritus Professor of Zoology, University of London) Department of Biology (Medawar Building), University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, England, UK.

Extract

The climatic similarity of desert environments everywhere has engendered parallelism and the evolution of ecological analogues in different regions of the world. This tends to mask the actual diversity of their inhabitants. Although biodiversity may be poor in the desert, at least compared with most other terrestrial ecobiomes, deserts are extremely vulnerable to degradation and therefore deserve as much as, or even more, consideration than many biologically richer habitats.

Type
Main Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1993

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