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Ogasawara Islands
| Site number: | 1362 |
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| Type of site: | Natural | |
| Date of Inscription: | 2011 | |
| Location: | Asia, Japan, Ogasawara Islands | |
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| Description: | The property numbers more than 30 islands clustered in three groups and covers surface area of 7,393 hectares. The islands offer a variety of landscapes and are home to a wealth of fauna, including the Bonin Flying Fox, a critically endangered bat, and 195 endangered bird species. Four-hundred and forty-one native plant taxa have been documented on the islands whose waters support numerous species of fish, cetaceans and corals. Ogasawara Islands' ecosystems reflect a range of evolutionary processes illustrated through its assemblage of plant species from both southeast and northwest Asia, alongside many endemic species. --WHMNet's description is from WHC Site, where additional information is available. | |
| The Bonin Islands, known in Japan as the Ogasawara Group (小笠原群島, Ogasawara Guntō?) are an archipelago of over 30 subtropical and tropical islands, some 1,000 kilometres (540 nmi; 620 mi) directly south of Tokyo, Japan. Administratively, they are part of Ogasawara Municipality (mura) of Ogasawara Subprefecture, Tokyo. The total area of the islands is 73 square kilometres (28 sq mi), with a population of 2440 (2000 on Chichijima, and 440 on Hahajima). The Ogasawara Islands were added to UNESCO's list of World Natural Heritage sites in July 2011 as animals and plants there have undergone unique evolutionary processes since these islands have never been connected with a continent, thus often dubbed as the "Galapagos of the Orient". The only inhabited islands of the group are Chichi-jima (父島), the seat of the municipal government, and Haha-jima (母島) includes what is within Ogasawara Village. In Japanese, the archipelago is called Ogasawara Group (小笠原群島, Ogasawara Guntō?). By contrast, the term Ogasawara Archipelago (小笠原諸島, Ogasawara shotō?), is a wider, collective term for all islands of Ogasawara Municipality, which also includes the Volcano Islands and a few isolated islands. The common English name for Ogasawara Guntō is Bonin Islands, from bunin, an archaic reading of 無人 (mujin), that means "no people" or "uninhabited." Rich of unique forms of life, the archipelago was nominated as a natural World Heritage Site on June 24, 2011. --Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. | ||
| Source: | http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1362 | |
| Reference: | 1. UNESCO World Heritage Center (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1362). 2. Wikipedia. | |