(4a) Salvage near home (overview)

Most people, obviously, live in settled areas, like cities, towns and farming districts.

You might expect that settled areas are the places with the best records for biodiversity sampling: most sites visited, most species recorded. Settled areas are also the places where natural habitats have been most fragmented. But if the fauna and flora of the settled area has already been well sampled, surely there won’t be much point in salvaging the local remnants? Surely there won’t be many new species to be found, or significant range extensions for known species?

Your expectation may be wrong. Biologists and naturalists like to do their sampling in places where Nature is still going strong. They also prefer to do their collecting and recording on public land, of which there’s often a shortage in well-settled areas. These factors mean that the best-sampled places may be parks and reserves well away from urban and farming areas.

I tested this idea in an unpublished study reported anecdotally in my 2004 paper on salvage (see post 1, above). I found that in my home island of Tasmania, the best-recorded places for invertebrates were in wilderness.

I also looked at forest remnants in settled areas, to see how close they were to invertebrate collecting sites. The analysis was re-done for this blog with slightly different datasets and is detailed in the next post. The most remarkable finding was that six of the 10 remnants furthest from a recorded locality for terrestrial invertebrates were within 25 km of the centre of Hobart, Tasmania’s largest city. All six of these remnants are in private land.

As I said in the 2004 paper, in Tasmania ... the places where the bush is most fragmented and most at risk of further loss and degradation are the places whose invertebrate fauna is least known. (p. 506)

I’d be interested to see a similar analysis done in other parts of the world.