Recorded extinctions since 1500. *Categories I-IV afford higher levels of protection.

overview Stretching in an arc over 3,000 kilometers of northern Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and the northwestern and northeastern states of India, the Himalaya hotspot includes all of the worldâ??s mountain peaks higher than 8,000 meters. This includes the worldâ??s highest mountain, Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) as well as several of the worldâ??s deepest river gorges. This immense mountain range, which covers nearly 750,000 km², has been divided into two regions: the Eastern Himalaya, which covers parts of Nepal, Bhutan, the northeast Indian states of West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, and Arunachal Pradesh, southeast Tibet (China), and northern Myanmar; and the Western Himalaya, covering the Kumaon-Garhwal, northwest Kashmir, and northern Pakistan. While these divisions are largely artificial, the deep defile carved by the antecedent Kali Gandaki River between the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri mountains has been an effective dispersal barrier to many species. The abrupt rise of the Himalayan Mountains from less than 500 meters to more than 8,000 meters results in a diversity of ecosystems that range, in only a couple of hundred kilometers, from alluvial grasslands (among the tallest in the world) and subtropical broad leaf forests along the foothills to temperate broad leaf forests in the mid hills, mixed conifer and conifer forests in the higher hills, and alpine meadows above the treeline.

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