Think harder than South Amercia because of the Amazon.
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Asia?
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Yeah I have thought of that before.
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It’s huge.
it’s not directly related to your question, but your prompt got me wondering if there is more biodiversity on land or in the water: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212011529 and https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_planet_report_timeline/lpr_2012/health_of_our_planet/biomes/.
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From @pisum’s second link: “All habitat types . . . are losing biodiversity. But the decline is greatest in freshwater habitats . . . The tropical freshwater index declined . . . by 70%”
@jasonhernandez74 you have commented on this several times (commented on the lack of observations of freshwater species, including tropical freshwater species)
Yes, I have. The disaster of it is that the total number of freshwater fish species is estimated to be approximately the same as the total number of marine fish species, even though freshwater is such a tiny percentage of earth’s water. The reason is because each river system can potentially have its own endemics, whereas the oceans have fewer barriers and species can be more widespread.
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Is the most biodiverse continent the one with the highest total number of species or the highest richness per area on average? I don’t know the answer either way, but in terms of total richness I would also think Asia due to the huge geographic range including everything from tropical rainforest, coral reefs, alpine areas and all the way up to arctic tundra.
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The former, as in total number of species.
I’d say Asia because of its size and because it has all climates on the planet so… maybe?
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I choose South America.
also the Gobi desert.
Africa too has Sahara, Namib and Karoo.
Glaciers (melting) on the Equator.
Rain forests.
And my Cape Floral Kingdom way down South.
If you include the marine zone off-shore we have both cold and warm ocean currents.
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Deserts aren’t that biodiverse are they?
You have never visited a desert to look at biodiversity?
There is the fragile biocrust for a start.
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/namib-desert about 4K sp for example
South America
https://www.quora.com/Which-continent-has-the-most-biodiversity
As entities, Continents are not that meaningful, biologically speaking.
As many as 44% of all species of vascular plants and 35% of all species in four vertebrate groups are confined to 25 hotspots comprising only 1.4% of the land surface of the Earth.
Myers, N., Mittermeier, R., Mittermeier, C., da Fonseca, G., Kent, J., 2000. Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature 403: 853, 853–858.
1.4%. We should be worried about that.
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I remember reading somewhere that deciduous forests are incredibly biodiverse (though not as much as rainforests) and have nutrient-rich soil. This may just be regional bias talking, but I think North America may be the richest continent in biodiversity (or at least the second most). North America has a ton of different biomes, so it wouldn’t surprise me that there are a lot of different species.
Edit: to clarify, North America has biomes such as the tundra, taiga, nearly if not all types of deserts (arid, coastal, etc), temperate rainforests, deciduous forests, grasslands, tropical rainforests, and more. That doesn’t even cover the aquatic biomes like coral reefs, although I don’t think those technically count as biomes.
I know for sure it is not Antarctica
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Anywhere that had glaciation during the last ice age is a lot less biodiverse because it had to start from scratch 20,000 years ago. E.g. Britain.
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I photographed plants way before I knew about inatting in Joshua Tree National Park. I guess they are biodiverse but pales in comparison to places like the Andean Cloud Forests.
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