Africa: Still the "Dark Continent"
An Editorial: Conservation Biology, 21(3) June 2007

Stuart L. Pimm
Conservation Ecology Research Unit, Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa, email stuartpimm@aol.com

Henry Stanley named Africa "The Dark Continent" in his 1878 travelogue, remarking that it was poorly known. Only 7 years later, the Congress of Berlin felt obliged to carve up the darkness into convenient chunks for the European powers' pleasure and profit. Naturally, at that time, Europeans did not invite Africans to the party. Thus, country boundaries reflected European whims, not natural tribal boundaries, or ecological niceties, such as coasts or rivers—an issue of some importance for conservation today..............

....... Africa has Madagascar (an estimated 9,700 endemic plants), the Eastern Arc Mountains of Kenya and Tanzania (1,500), the West African forests (2,250), the Cape Floristic Province (5,700), the Karoo (1,900), and the Mediterranean Basin—which includes parts of Europe and Asia (1,300). South America has the tropical Andes (20,000), Meso-America (5,000), the Caribbean (7,000), Western Ecuador (2,250), Brazil's cerrado (4,400), Central Chile (1,605), and the Atlantic coast forests (8000). A hotspot—by Myers et al.'s (2000) definition—is a collision between areas of high endemism and excessive levels of habitat loss; that combination best predicts the concentrations of species most at risk of extinction. Both continents contain many areas of concern. Moreover, Myers (personal communication) notes that some areas of Africa—along the coast of Mozambique, for example—are still poorly explored botanically but come close to meeting his original criteria for being a hotspot.

Details at the Conservation Biology