Indonesia: Transmigration & extinction along Wallacea Line
Most of the tropical forest covering the Wallacea Line in eastern Indonesia have been cleared in the last half century, thanks to government programs. A recent study found that besides clearing forests, the government-sponsored transmigration program had put dozens of rare bird, mammal and amphibian species in danger of extinction.
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The transmigration program, launched during former president
Soeharto’s era, was aimed at tackling overcrowding on densely
populated islands by moving large numbers of people to sparsely
inhabited areas. The report said there were currently about 1,500
endemic species of plants, 49 of threatened birds, 44 of mammals and
seven of threatened amphibians in the Wallacea area.The Wallacea line,
named after naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace who explored the area
between 1854 and 1862, runs between Bali and Lombok to Borneo and
Sulawesi. The world’s largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, is restricted
to the islands of Komodo, Padar, Rinca and Flores in the Wallacea
hotspot. The area is one of 23 hotspots to have experienced “warfare”
in the second half of the 20th century, said the study published in
the scientific journal Conservation Biology. See: http://bit.ly/bIlaX
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Alfred Russel Wallace, the so-called father of animal geography, formulated his ideas on evolution by natural selection while observing and collecting wildlife in the islands of Southeast Asia. He was particularly impressed by the sudden difference in bird families he encountered when he sailed some twenty miles east of the island of Bali and landed on Lombok.
On Bali the birds were clearly related to those of the larger islands of Java and Sumatra and mainland Malaysia while the birds on Lombok were related to New Guinean and Australian communities. He marked the channel between Bali and Lombok as the divide between two great zoogeographic regions, the Oriental and Australian. In his honor this dividing line, which extends northward between Borneo and Sulawesi, is still referred to today as Wallace’s Line
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