Terrestrial Biodiversity of the Austral Islands, French Polynesia

As part of a larger research program aiming to inventory and evaluate the terrestrial biodiversity of French Polynesia, a series of multidisciplinary scientific expeditions were conducted in 2002, 2003, and 2004 to the five inhabited Austral Islands--Raivavae, Rapa, Rimatara, Rurutu, and Tubuai--at the southernmost tip of this French collectivity. This book contains the findings of those expeditions.

The primary goals of these studies were to: identify and characterize the Austral Islands' terrestrial and freshwater native habitats, in order to assess their conservation status; to localize the natural areas of high ecological value; to conduct exhaustive inventories of native and alien vascular plant species and animals (mainly birds, mollusks, insects, and other arthropods); to estimate the distribution and abundance of threatened species and assess their conservation status; to identify past and current threats to species and their habitats; to study the dynamics and evolution of the terrestrial biota compared with historic data; and to propose recommendations for biodiversity conservation and natural resource management. Taken as a whole, the obtained results have greatly improved our knowledge of the ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary and conservation biology of the Austral Islands terrestrial biota.

Jean-Yves Meyer is a plant ecologist and conservation biologist. He has been working on the terrestrial biodiversity of French Polynesia for the past twenty years as a senior research scientist at the Délégation à la Recherche de la Polynésie française (French Polynesian Department of Research) based in Tahiti. He was responsible for organizing the multidisciplinary expeditions to the Austral Islands (2002-4). Elin M. Claridge is an entomologist by training. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006 and participated in the Austral Islands expeditions (2002-4) as well as organized entomological surveys in other archipelagoes of French Polynesia (Society, Marquesas, Tuamotu, 2005-7). She is now living in Rurutu.