524 SCIENCE AND CULTURE, NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 2010 T his year (2010) has been declared as the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) to boost the awareness about biodiversity and its conservation. At this auspicious time, it is very important to know what biodiversity actually means. International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defined biodiversity as a term to describe the variety of life on earth. It is the wide variety of ecosystems and living organisms: animals, plants, their habitats and their genes. Rapid urbanization, unsustainable consumption of natural resources and destruction of wildlife are directing biodiversity under great threat. Loss of biodiversity is a serious irreversible phenomenon. While extinction of species is a natural culmination, anthropogenic activities have increased the rate of extinction by at least a thousand fold, possibly several thousand times than the natural rate 1- 4 . With this scenario, challenge before the ecologist/ conservationists is to identify the areas that immediate need conservation. British ecologist Norman Myers introduced biodiversity hotspots concept to address this dilemma faced by the conservationists 5 . Biodiversity hotspots are those regions of the terrestrial ecosystem which are highly rich with endemic species. Presently, there are total 34 biodiversity hotspots all over the world. Each of this hotspot has already lost at least 70 percent of its original natural vegetation. More than 50 percent of the plant species and 42 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate species are endemic to these hotspots 6 . Among the hotspots identified so far, 3 hotspots are extended within Indian sub-continent. These three Asia- Pacific hotspots are namely, Himalayan region, Indo-Burma region and Western Ghats- Sri Lanka regions. In the present article an attempt has been made to demonstrate the present status of endemic birds of these three hotspots with special emphasis on human impact on biodiversity loss and to identify a single hotspot that deserves maximum attention for bird conservation among them. Identification of areas with priority is very crucial today because of our insufficient conservation budget in comparison to requirement for saving huge number of species threatened with extinction. Brief description of the three hotspot regions under study : Indo – Burma region : The Indo–Burma hotspot extends to east of Ganges – Brahmaputra lowland of tropical Asia. It poses the area of 2,373,000 km 2 including the Himalayan chain and the associated foothills in Nepal, Bhutan and India. This hotspot contains the Lower Mekong catchment. It starts from eastern Bangladesh and THE STATUS OF ENDEMIC BIRDS IN THREE INDIAN HOT SPOTS: A REVIEW OF AVAILABLE DATA SRUTI KARMAKAR 1* , TANMAY BHATTACHARYA 2 AND SOUGATA KARMAKAR 3 Species extinction is the main disaster of biodiversity. Protection of bio-diversity and prevention of extinction of endemic species are the greatest challenge to conservationists. Three biodiversity hotspots of Indian sub-continent e.g., Himalayan, Indo-Burma and Western Ghats-Sri Lanka regions are of specific importance from endemism of aves species. Present article attempts to investigate recent status of the aves species in those hotspots and identifying the hotspot which deserves maximum attention and priority from conservation point of view. ARTICLE 1* Dept. of Geology, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur-731209, West Bengal, India. E-mail: sruti_karmakar@yahoo.co.in 2 Dept. of Zoology, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore -721102,West Bengal, India. E-mail: tanmaybhattacharya@yahoo.com 3 Dept. of Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati-781039, Assam, India. E-mail: karmakar.sougata@gmail.com