Wallacea

Wallacea is a living laboratory of Earth's evolution – and its wildlife, forests and reefs will be devastated unless we all act

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Friday, August 11, 2023

Wallacea is a fascinating region of both land and sea.

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Wallacea is a fascinating region of both land and sea.
Spanning approximately 338,000 square kilometres within Indonesia, it is home to a rich diversity of animals and plants, with hybrid species from both Asia and Australia/Papua regions.
Take a look at incredible species such as the komodo dragon, anoa, tarsier, babirusa, and giant bees.

Its northern boundary begins at the Talaud Islands (North Sulawesi) and reaches down to Rote Ndao Regency in the south – in East Nusa Tenggara Province, near Australia.
This imaginary line defining its boundaries is known as the “Wallacea line.” Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist, was the first western scientist to explore the biodiversity in this region.
Two centuries have passed since Wallace’s work, and the Wallacea region has drastically changed from what the naturalist once observed.

It occurred primarily due to foreign investments in Indonesia for forest logging concessions and the establishment of oil palm plantations.
From palm oil plantations in West Sulawesi to land clearing and development, changes driven by human activities continue to flourish in the region.
These companies have cleared forests and other ecosystems to make way for palm oil, cocoa and chocolate plantations.
Nickel mining also became a prevalent industrial activity in these areas, due to growing demand for nickels as a raw material for electric vehicle batteries.

There are more than 40 infrastructure projects underway, including dams, roads, railway systems, oil and gas initiatives, and many others.
In the ocean, valuable ecosystems like coral reefs have suffered extensive damage as a result of overfishing and destructive practices.

The world must pay careful attention to the future of the ecosystems in Wallacea.
Without serious conservation efforts, millions of hectares of forests in this region could transform into desolate wastelands.
We’re hoping this event grabs more public interest and gets everyone working together to come up with fresh ideas for keeping it all preserved.

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Thursday, July 6, 2023

This goes without saying; we know Australia is full of weird and wonderful creatures found nowhere else on Earth, such as the platypus and the koala.

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This goes without saying; we know Australia is full of weird and wonderful creatures found nowhere else on Earth, such as the platypus and the koala.
Yet the traffic was largely one way – there are far fewer representatives of Australian fauna in Asia than there are Asian fauna in Australia.

Dinosaurs were still a fairly new group walking the Earth, and Australia was part of a supercontinent called Gondwana.
Gondwana had just broken off from another supercontinent, called Laurasia, which was smooshed together from modern North America, Europe and Asia.
As it drifted northwards, the increasing space between Australia and Antarctica kick-started the Antarctic circumpolar current, which cooled the planet dramatically.
Read more:
Explainer: how the Antarctic Circumpolar Current helps keep Antarctica frozen
Australia was isolated, cooling down and drying out.

He first observed a difference in the types of animals found on either side of what is now called Wallace’s line.
The islands became stepping stones between two continents whose groups of species hadn’t seen each other in a very, very long time.

Of all the groups of animals that moved between Asia and Australia, we found the staggering majority were birds.
Animals also needed to be able to thrive in their new location, where the environment may have been quite different.
Sunda is wet and Sahul is dry, and if you can tolerate more of that wet–dry spectrum, you are better equipped to move between these regions.

We know Sunda has been dominated by lush tropical rainforest since before Australia broke away from Antarctica.
Later, when the stepping-stone islands began to pop up, they also had the kind of humid equatorial climate favoured by the rainforest vegetation, and later animals, from Sunda.
So moving from mainland Australia, through New Guinea and the stepping stones, to Sunda, requires adaptations to a very different environment.