[Taxacom] Evotourism as a New Zealand opportunity

[John Grehan]

Small article just published in the Otago Botanical Society Newsletter.
First couple of paragraphs below. Anyone interested in a copy please email
me directly.

John Grehan

Evotourism as a New Zealand opportunity.

Zealandia has received quite a lot of popular press in recent times, with
its focus on New Zealand and surrounding regions as a continental fragment
that broke away from the rest of Gondwana in the Cretaceous. As this
continental fragment was pushed eastwards by the newly formed Tasman Sea,
much of the original land area subsided and was submerged. This history has
led to the question as to what extent the original plant and animal
communities were also separated and survived through to the present day.
Many studies have accepted that a wide range of groups were indeed
separated. Recent Miocene fossil discoveries have also highlighted the
presence of a diverse endemic New Zealand fauna and flora that survived the
major Oligocene sea transgressions. These discoveries have lent support to
the pioneering works of Robin Craw and Michael Heads in the 1970’s and 80’s
that first drew detailed attention to the matching patterns of geology and
biogeography in New Zealand. These constituted evidence that New Zealand’s
modern biota is mostly made up of Gondwanan relicts.

Craw and Heads argued that the extensive parallels between the
distributions of organisms and the underlying geological structures
indicated that New Zealand’s biota is not just an assemblage of
miscellaneous Gondwanan organisms, but comprises actual biogeographic
fragments of the former supercontinent. With a 90 + million year history of
repeated subsidence, uplift, and displacement it might hardly seem credible
to accept any distributional stability at all. But incredible or not,
detailed biogeographic analyses provide evidence of at least a partial
geographic imprint of the Gondwana landscape in the distributions of modern
biota. It is this ‘incredible’ result that lends itself to an as yet
unexploited potential – what I would call evotourism.