Ecoregion Conservation (ERC) is an approach for conservation planning and action across ecoregions. Because these strategies are based on ecoregions, they capture the broad-scale patterns of biological diversity and the ecological processes that sustain them.
The key principles ecoregion conservation include:
The first step in ERC is to identify the natural habitats, ecological processes, and population attributes that will be required to conserve the full range of biodiversity in an ecoregion over the long-term. The outcome of this process is a biodiversity vision that portrays priority areas or even a specific conservation area network that the ecoregion should protect in order to conserve its biodiversity and ecological processes in the future.