Australasian realm in the context of "Moluccas"

Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and to quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.

Wallace did extensive fieldwork, starting in the Amazon River basin. He then did fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species, and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography", or more specifically of zoogeography.

The Oceanian realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms and is unique in not including any continental land mass. It has the smallest land area of any of the WWF realms.

This realm includes the islands of the Pacific Ocean in Micronesia, the Fijian Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, and Polynesia (with the exception of New Zealand). New Zealand, Australia, and most of Melanesia including New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia are included within the Australasian realm.

A biogeographic realm is the broadest biogeographic division of Earth's land surface, based on distributional patterns of terrestrial organisms. They are subdivided into bioregions, which are further subdivided into ecoregions.A biogeographic realm is also known as "ecozone", although that term may also refer to ecoregions.

The Vanuatu rain forests are tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests ecoregion which includes the islands of Vanuatu, as well as the Santa Cruz Islands group of the neighboring Solomon Islands. It is part of the Australasian realm, which includes neighboring New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands, as well as Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand.

Oceania is a region centered on the islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Conceptions of what constitutes Oceania vary, with it being defined in various ways, often geopolitically or geographically. In the geopolitical conception used by the United Nations, International Olympic Committee, and many atlases, the Oceanic region includes Australia and the nations of the Pacific from Papua New Guinea east, but not the Malay Archipelago or Indonesian New Guinea. The term is sometimes used more specifically to denote Australasia as a geographic continent, or biogeographically as a synonym for either the Australasian realm (Wallacea and Australasia) or the Oceanian realm (Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia apart either from New Zealand or from mainland New Guinea).

Although Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands belong to the Commonwealth of Australia and are inhabited, they are nearer Indonesia than the Australian mainland, and are commonly associated with Asia instead of Oceania.

The frogmouths (Podargidae) are a group of nocturnal birds related to owlet-nightjars, swifts, and hummingbirds. Species in the group are distributed in the Indomalayan and Australasian realms.

The Indomalayan realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms. It extends across most of South and Southeast Asia and into the southern parts of East Asia.

Also called the Oriental realm by biogeographers, Indomalaya spreads all over the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia to lowland southern China, and through Indonesia as far as Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Borneo, east of which lies the Wallace line, the realm boundary named after Alfred Russel Wallace which separates Indomalaya from Australasia. Indomalaya also includes the Philippines, lowland Taiwan, and Japan's Ryukyu Islands.

This page features a list of biogeographic provinces that were developed by Miklos Udvardy in 1975, later modified by other authors. Biogeographic Province is a biotic subdivision of biogeographic realms subdivided into ecoregions, which are classified based on their biomes or habitat types and, on this page, correspond to the floristic kingdoms of botany.

The provinces represent the large areas of Earth's surface within which organisms have been evolving in relative isolation over long periods of time, separated from one another by geographic features, such as oceans, broad deserts, or high mountain ranges, that constitute barriers to migration.

Ecoregions in Australia are geographically distinct plant and animal communities, defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature based on geology, soils, climate, and predominant vegetation.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) identified 825 terrestrial ecoregions that cover the Earth's land surface, 40 of which cover Australia and its dependent islands. The WWF ecoregions are classified by biome type (tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands, tundra, etc.), and into one of eight terrestrial realms. Australia, together with New Zealand, New Guinea and neighboring island groups, is part of the Australasian realm. The IBRA bioregions informed the delineation of the WWF ecoregions for Australia, and the WWF ecoregions generally follow the same ecoregion boundaries, while often clustering two or more similar bioregions into a larger ecoregion. The ecoregion articles in Wikipedia generally follow the WWF scheme.