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.