A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
endemic
A species is endemic to a place if it occurs there naturally and nowhere else. The word says nothing about how rare or common the thing is within that range; a plant covering an entire island is endemic to it, and so is a snail confined to one canyon. Islands, isolated mountains, ancient lakes, and chemically unusual soils all generate endemics, because each of them is effectively an island in the sense that matters.
Etymology
The word is Greek for in the people and it started life in medicine rather than in biology. An endemic disease was one habitually present in a particular locality, as against an epidemic, which is one that arrives and spreads. Nineteenth-century naturalists borrowed the term for organisms.
Notes
Endemism is measured in nested scales, so a bird can be endemic to Hawaii, to one island, and to one valley on that island, and all three statements are true. The opposite is not exotic but cosmopolitan, meaning found nearly everywhere, which is a word applied to peregrine falcons, ospreys, and barn owls.