Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Tenerife has the greatest number of endemic species per square kilometer in Europe
Cruz del Carmen, in the Las Mercedes mountains in the north of Tenerife, is the point in Europe which has the greatest exclusive biodiversity in the smallest space and contains the largest number of endemic species per square meter in Europe.
An endemic species is one that only exists in a particular geographic area and, in this case, environmental agencies of the Canary Islands' government have listed 468 taxonomies exclusive to the Canary Islands in this one small area.
At Cruz del Carmen, 16 percent of the flora and 12 percent of the fauna endemic to the islands can be found. In the Anaga area there is a total of 731 endemic species and in the Canary Islands as a whole, a grand total of 13,328 endemic species have been listed.
The archipelago has a great richness in biodiversity and the discovery of new species increases this year by year. The relevance of this heritage is such that, a new species is described in the islands, on average, every six days and that an endemic species exists for every two square kilometers. Tenerife, despite it's small comparable size, has more endemic species than the whole of Germany or England.
El mayor número de especies exclusivas por kilómetro cuadrado de Europa, en Tenerife
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