🎒 Base knowledge and understanding

✅ Tasks

🌿 Content

🔑 Key terms

🎯 Context

In biodiversity.1.4.hl Reproductive Isolation and Biodiversity Hotspots, you learnt that biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the planet. You met the 36 biodiversity hotspots (areas with at least 1,500 endemic vascular plant species AND at least 70% of original primary vegetation lost) and looked at the Mediterranean Basin in detail.

This lesson is the further HL deepening of that idea. It asks three connected questions:

1. Why does the location of biodiversity matter for conservation? Most hotspots are in tropical biomes, in lower-income countries. What does that mean for the practical challenge of protecting them?
2. Within hotspots, can we identify the most important sites? This is the role of Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs).
3. Once a site has been identified as globally important, what stops it being protected? The answer is conflict between exploitation, sustainable development and conservation.

By the end of the lesson you should be able to: explain the implications of biodiversity distribution for conservation, describe what a KBA is using two contrasting examples, and analyse the conflict that occurs in a named KBA.

Phase 1: Where is the world's biodiversity?

Pattern-spot the global hotspots map