Although Earth's islands make up less than four per cent of the planet's land mass, they are home to around a quarter of the world's known plants - 70,000 of which do not exist anywhere else.

“Humanity doesn’t need a moon-base or a manned trip to Mars. We need an expedition to planet Earth, where probably fewer than 10 per cent of species are known to science, and fewer than 1 per cent of those have been studied beyond a simple anatomical description and a few notes on natural history. At the same time, we are engaged in a genocide against those species, known and unknown; the sixth mass extinction has begun."

E.O. Wilson, Harvard evolutionary biologist and author of "The Creation."