Dear Vinayak, Really good idea - and like many good ideas, it's already been done! In 2008, a team looked at the historical importance of how and why marine biodiversity is distributed the way it is:

Renema, et al. Hopping Hotspots: Global Shifts in Marine Biodiversity. Science 321, 654 (2008);

I won't be spoiling anything by clarifying that the coral triangle in SE Asia is not only the hottest hotspot for marine biodiversity, but it shares many features with the other lesser hotspots - mostly about centers of endemism and drivers of speciation vs extinction along the same lines as the terrestrial work. In particular, the publication points out that marine resources and biodiversity need their own set of criteria to manage and protect them into the future, and these strategies will not be the same as the ones that might work for terrestrial systems. Let me know if you want a PDF of the original. And best of luck with your research! David

Here are some more papers for you, please see attached.

The answers done are rather enough, they were in my potential suggestion.

Dear Vinayak,

I agree with David: see how marine biomes are categorized and also look at the interfaces between marine and terrestrial biomes (mangrove swamps, salt marshes, estuaries, intertidal zones...

Best,

Guy

Here's a useful account of the application of many well-accepted criteria via a KBA process (both terrestrial and marine realms) in the Philippines:

Ambal, R. G. R., Duya, M. V., Cruz, M. A., Coroza, O. G., Vergara, S. G., de Silva, N., … Tabaranza, B. (2012). Key Biodiversity Areas in the Philippines: Priorities for Conservation. Journal of Threatened Taxa, 04(08), 2788–2796. http://doi.org/10.11609/JoTT.o2995.2788-96

(Link: http://threatenedtaxa.org/index.php/JoTT/article/download/784/1402)

Thank you all for your inputs.

If you are wanting to look at the overlap (or lack thereof) between terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity, check out this paper by Abell et al. Its spatial scale is somewhat broad, but they were looking at this globally and were using data sets from 2010.

Note: the term "aquatic" can refer to freshwater and marine systems. Throughout my academic history, "aquatic" was used to refer to freshwater systems, while "marine" was used to refer to - well - marine systems. Since it appears that most of the recommendations above were for marine, I thought it would be prudent to add a freshwater perspective.

Good luck!

Article Concordance of freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity

Many thanks dear Shaw.