Wallace Line
Sign in to savefaunal boundary line separating the ecozones of Asia and Wallacea, a transitional zone between Asia and Australia
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The Wallace Line is an imaginary boundary that separates the animals and ecosystems of Asia from those of Australia, running through a transitional region called Wallacea in between. It matters because it helped scientists understand how geography shapes which animals live where, and it remains an important concept for studying how species are distributed across different parts of the world.
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Wallace's Line delineates Australian and Southeast Asian fauna. The probable extent of land at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, when the sea level was more than 110 m (360 ft) lower than today, is shown in grey. The deep water of the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok formed a water barrier even when lower sea levels linked the now-separated islands and landmasses on either side.
The Wallace Line or Wallace's Line is a faunal boundary line drawn in 1859 by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and named by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.