Flora
With a high proportion of endemic species, the Canary Islands are to flora what the Galapagos Islands are to fauna and Tenerife even has over a hundred endemic species of its own. In addition the island has an incredible range of vegetation with almost every vegetation zone in the world represented on the island. In addition to the many native species, many plants introduced from elsewhere have also readily flourished on the islands (illustrated best by the lush and varied Botanical Gardens in Puerto de la Cruz). The mountainous nature of the island helps to cause this - since this provides a large range of ecological niches, but also because trade winds and a cold Canary ocean current act to cool the island's subtropical maritime climate, particularly its northern side, where there's often thermal inversion and consequently cloud cover above about 1000m. In contrast, the range and even numbers of birds and animals on the island are small and generally unimpressive. The reason behind the high level of endemicity of the Canary Islands again lies in their mild maritime climate . This has meant that drastic climate changes occurring nearby, such as ice ages in Europe or the drying of the Sahara have been considerably tempered in their effects on the Canary Islands. As a result a large number of plant species endemic to Macronesia are also ancient species such as the Dragon Tree , one of eighty species that survived the Tertiary ice ages on Tenerife, but died elsewhere. Four basic ecological zones have been identified on the island: a lower zone of arid scrubland; a laurel forest zone (absent from the southern side); a zone of pine forest; and finally a high mountain area. The zone of arid shrubland is at its starkest in the dry dusty south of the island. Here succulents naturally dominate, with cacti growing where they can. The prickly pear is particularly abundant, though not a native plant, having been introduced for the cochineal bug industry in the nineteenth century. Now out of hand, it has become problematic, spreading invasively and competing with local flora. Outside the dry southern area and up to altitudes of 600m the land becomes progressively greener and is used all around the island, as farmland . Farming is made possible using a huge network of irrigation tunnels dug deep into the island's centre and thanks to the painstaking construction of thousands of terraces. Bananas are the dominant crop on the island, although various vegetables, including potatoes and tomatoes, and fruits such as oranges and mangoes are also common Above 600m, forests begin to take over. In the Anaga and Teno and on La Gomera, this is predominantly an ancient forest dominated by laurel trees - another refugee of the Tertiary-era ice ages. Elsewhere the dominant fauna is pine forest , consisting almost exclusively of the endemic Canarian Pine . At the time of conquest, forest covered nine-tenths of Tenerife and La Gomera, but today, thanks to extensive logging, it only covers about a fifth. Most of the area above the tree line in Tenerife is protected in the Parque Nacional del Teide . This tundra-style wilderness harbours only the hardiest of plants, and is mainly the domain of tough little shrubs, with the exceptions of the resilient pretty little Teide violet , and the impressive two-metre high flowering conical spike of the Tajinaste rojo . Its likely that there were more such interesting endemic plants, but that these disappeared well before the Spanish conquest when the Guanches introduced goats into the area.
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