Abstract
The Ogasawara Islands are created in the process of island-arc formation due to the ongoing subduction of an oceanic plate; these islands have witnessed unique speciation histories due to their remoteness from mainland Japan and any other continental landmass. The Ogasawara Islands were inscribed onto the UNESCO World Heritage List as a Natural Property due to high species endemism, adaptive radiation, and low extinction rates, but the total landform–landscape–ecosystem uniqueness and value deserves to be upheld as a natural heritage. Today, these islands have become one of the premier ecotourism destinations in Japan, but at the same time, tourism has the potential to negatively affect these isolated environments. This chapter explains the outstanding universal value of this heritage and analyzes the threat of invasive species for native ecosystems and challenges for managing tourism in a way that can help preserve this highly valuable system.
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Notes
- 1.
“Hot spots” are postulated as locations directly above mantle plumes that create active volcanoes when unusually hot magma pierces the Lithosphere (Morgan 1971). However, the hypothesis has courted controversy since it was first proposed to explain the formation of the Hawaiian Islands, and the a priori existence of superhot mantle plumes is an increasingly criticized concept now. For more details, see Foulger (2010).
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Yoshida, M. (2018). Ogasawara Islands World Heritage Area: An Outstanding Ecological Heritage. In: Chakraborty, A., Mokudai, K., Cooper, M., Watanabe, M., Chakraborty, S. (eds) Natural Heritage of Japan. Geoheritage, Geoparks and Geotourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61896-8_6
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