Taking Care Of Biodiverse Islands

Newsday 27 May 2021 – Islands have a special appeal – why else do visitors flock to tropical islands as places of idyll and escape. Islanders must exercise special care of their ecosystems which are fragile. Dr Anjani Ganase explains why islands are more vulnerable; and considers the delicate balance.

The definition of an island is a piece of land surrounded by water. There is an upper limit to how big islands can be; very large land masses, such as Australia, are considered continents. Usually, they are as small as the rocks we observe out at sea. The largest is Greenland, followed by New Guinea. Islands are mostly found in the ocean but can occur in lakes and rivers. The Orinoco River has several islands in its mouth formed by the sediment collected by the river. Consider the high-end New York neighbourhood of Manhattan that sits on an island in the Hudson River?

Islands are found everywhere around the world in all latitudes, but also at different elevations. In South America, there are five islands in Lake Titicaca at 3,000 metres above sea-level in the Andes. The local tribes there built many more artificial floating islands. While islands are home to some of the largest cities in the world, Tokyo, Japan and Jakarta, Indonesia, only the tiniest may be uninhabited. The most remote islands in the world are the Pitcairn islands, an overseas territory of the Great Britain, found in the southern Pacific. It has a population of 49 and the closest major land mass is New Zealand over 3,000 miles to its west. In the southern Atlantic, Tristan da Cunha, another remote overseas territory of Great Britain, indicates how far the reach of empire extended.

READ MORE