Most of us have daydreamed about escaping to a quiet place. Two sisters actually did it. The island later passed to the trust, which now runs it as a nature reserve.
The Cornwall Wildlife Trust says Evelyn and Babs Atkins bought Looe Island, off the Cornwall coast, in the 1960s and lived there for decades.
Looe Island is small, but islands matter for a bigger reason. Globally, biodiversity loss is especially rapid on islands , where invasive species play a major role as drivers of extinction. Looe Island is one small example, and that study covers much more ground. So the Atkins sisters’ story shouldn’t be read as proof that every island can be saved. It simply shows what one protected place can look like.
In a 2017 Science Advances paper , Dena Spatz and colleagues started with a stark fact. The team scoured existing research and consulted more than 500 experts to piece together the full picture. The survey covered some 465,000 islands worldwide. Researchers identified 1,189 highly threatened land vertebrates (as classified by the IUCN) that breed on 1,288 islands. That includes 319 amphibians, 282 reptiles, 296 birds and 292 mammals. These species make up 41% of all highly threatened land vertebrates, according to the study. The paper adds that the islands studied make up just 0.3% of the world’s estimated 465,000 islands, but 61% of the global island area.
