Biodiversity in New York State and a Location Elsewhere.
Introduction Specific kinds of wild organisms are not distributed worldwide, i.e. the natural range of any organism is not cosmopolitan. The only exceptions to this are species, which have been accidentally or deliberately introduced by humans into areas beyond their natural range and now have near-cosmopolitan distributions. A higher taxonomic group (e.g., the bird family Icteridae) or a particular species (e.g., Red-winged Blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus) typically has a restricted global range, which may be large or small. Many factors explain why particular kinds of organisms are found only in specific geographic areas, and these include evolutionary origin, limited powers of dispersal, geographic barriers, inability to tolerate high or low temperatures or precipitation, dependence on other species (e.g. host plants of insects that develop in plants or hosts of animal parasites), competition from other species, and so on. If a person who is familiar with, say, the birds of northeastern North America visits Uganda or Singapore or Bolivia or Sri Lanka they will be surprised to find that none of bird species that occur where they live in America are found in the place they visit. [They may find the Rock Dove (Feral Pigeon) or the House Sparrow in some of those places, but these are examples of species which have been introduced by humans beyond their natural range, as mentioned above.] In this assignment you will select a particular taxonomic group of organisms (e.g., flowering plants, butterflies, birds, mammals, etc.) and use the iNaturalist website (https://www.inaturalist.org/) to find out what species in that particular group are known to occur in New York State (“local”). Next, you will select a comparable geographic area in another part of the world (“global”) and determine which species in the group you selected are known to inhabit that second area. Depending on your choice of the second area there may be few or perhaps no species that are common to both New York State and your second geographic area of choice. What reasons may explain the difference in species in two locations in different parts of the globe? If there were species that were common to New York City and your second area of choice what might explain that distribution?