Turkey has a remarkable diversity of wildlife, due to its wide variety of habitats and unique position between three continents and three seas. Ill-considered development projects are threatening biodiversity, but a new wildlife corridor offers hope for further conservation progress – Michael Gross reports.
As Turkey hosts the northernmost part of the ‘Fertile Crescent’, where humans first developed agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, one might expect to find little wildlife left to protect after millennia of human management and exploitation of the land. On the other hand, a unique combination of geographical factors has provided Turkey with a surprisingly high level of biodiversity for a non-tropical country.
Read the full article to learn about this fascinating landscape and its unique species.
About the Author: Michael Gross is a science writer based at Oxford.
Source: Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 13, R503-R505, 10 July 2012.
