East Melanesian Islands

The East Melanesian Islands are a biogeographic region in the Melanesia part of Oceania, treated in conservation science as a biodiversity hotspot. The region takes in about 1,600 islands lying to the east and northeast of the island of New Guinea, together covering an area of about 100,000 square kilometers. Six ecoregions make up the hotspot, and tropical rainforest covers large tracts of it. Isolation on separate islands has given the region an unusually rich and distinctive living world: about 8,000 vascular plant species are recorded, roughly 3,000 of them found nowhere else, along with some 360 bird species, around 40 percent of them endemic, and 85 mammal species, nearly half of which live only here. Bats are the most diverse group of mammals. The region is a natural grouping defined by its ecology and island geography rather than by any single government, which is why it is held here as a region and not as a country or an administrative division.