. The Palaearctic realm also has numerous rivers and lakes, forming several freshwater ecoregions.
The term 'Palearctic' was first used in the 19th century, and is still in use as the basis for zoogeographic classification.
History
In an 1858 paper for the Proceedings of the
Neotropical. The six indicated general groupings of fauna, based on shared biogeography and large-scale geographic barriers to migration.[1]
Frontispiece to Alfred Russel Wallace's book The Geographical Distribution of Animals
Alfred Wallace adopted Sclater's scheme for his book The Geographical Distribution of Animals, published in 1876. This is the same scheme that persists today, with relatively minor revisions, and the addition of two more realms: Oceania and the Antarctic realm
The boreal and temperate Euro-Siberian region is the Palearctic's largest
Bering land bridge, and have very similar mammal and bird fauna, with many Eurasian species having moved into North America, and fewer North American species having moved into Eurasia. Many zoologists consider the Palearctic and Nearctic to be a single Holarctic realm. The Palearctic and Nearctic also share many plant species, which botanists call the Arcto-Tertiary Geoflora
endemic species. The Mediterranean basin is also one of the world's most endangered biogeographic regions; only 4% of the region's original vegetation remains, and human activities, including overgrazing, deforestation, and conversion of lands for pasture, agriculture, and urbanization, have degraded much of the region. Formerly the region was mostly covered with forests and woodlands, but heavy human use has reduced much of the region to the sclerophyll shrublands known as chaparral, matorral, maquis, or garrigue. Conservation International has designated the Mediterranean basin as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots
.
Sahara and Arabian deserts
Afrotropic
ecoregions. This scheme includes these desert ecoregions in the palearctic realm; other biogeographers identify the realm boundary as the transition zone between the desert ecoregions and the Mediterranean basin ecoregions to the north, which places the deserts in the Afrotropic, while others place the boundary through the middle of the desert.
Western and Central Asia
The
Euxine-Colchic deciduous forests
ecoregion.
Indomalaya
ecoregions.
East Asia
Fan Si Pan, 3,140 m; 10,300 ft) and the high mountains of Taiwan
.
Freshwater
The realm contains several important
Caspian seas, Siberia's Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake on the planet, and Japan's ancient Lake Biwa
.
Flora and fauna
One bird family, the
Holarctic has four other endemic bird families: the divers or loons (Gaviidae), grouse (Tetraoninae), auks (Alcidae), and waxwings
^Eric Dinerstein, David Olson, et al. (2017). An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm, BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 6, June 2017, Pages 534–545 [1]
General references
Amorosi, T. "Contributions to the zooarchaeology of Iceland: some preliminary notes" in The Anthropology of Iceland (eds. E.P. Durrenberger & G. Pálsson). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 203–227, 1989.
Buckland, P.C., et al. "Holt in Eyjafjasveit, Iceland: a paleoecological study of the impact of Landnám" in Acta Archaeologica 61: pp. 252–271. 1991.
Edmund Burke III, "The Transformation of the middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E.–2000 C.E." in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2009, 82–84.
Media from Commons
Travel information from Wikivoyage
