View Inventory Project

Southern Subpolar Region

Project Managers: Alan Fryday
The Southern Subpolar Region is here taken to be the area between the Antarctic Divergence and Subtropical Convergence. This region is often referred to as the Subantarctic, but that name refers to that part of the region south of the Antarctic Convergence, which has colder summers and a complete lack of arboreal vegetation (Øvstedal & Lewis Smith 2001). As trees are present on some of the areas under consideration they should not be considered "Subantarctic" and so the term "Southern Subpolar" is preferred.

The International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases for Plant Sciences (TDWG) (Brummitt 2001) include in their -Subantarctic Islands- region:
Australasia: Macquarie Island.
South Atlantic: Falkland Islands, South Georgia, South Shetland Islands, South Orkney Islands, Bouvetøya (all except the Falkland Islands included in Antarctica by Øvstedal & Lewis Smith 2001).
Indian Ocean: Tristan da Cunha & Gough Island, Prince Edward & Marion Islands, Crozet Island, Kerguelen, Heard & MacDonald Islands, St Paul Island & New Amsterdam.
 
This is the area used for this investigation, with the addition of the southern New Zealand Shelf Islands (Auckland Islands and Campbell Island) and the islands at the southern tip of South America: (e.g. Argentina: Tierra del Fuego (Isla Grande, Isla de los Estados); Chile: Cape Horn to Isla Wellington). Brummitt (loc. cit.) included these islands in the ‘New Zealand’ and ‘southern South America’ regions respectively, but I can see no reason to exclude these areas from the "Subantarctic" while including the Falkland Islands, and Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island.
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