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Ecoregions
WWF's Global 200
Limited funding compels the conservation community to be strategic and earmark the greatest amount of resources for the most outstanding and representative areas for biodiversity.
WWF's Global 200 is a first attempt to identify a set of ecoregions whose conservation would achieve the goal of saving a broad diversity of the Earth's ecosystems. These ecoregions include those with exceptional levels of biodiversity, such as high species richness or endemism, or those with unusual ecological or evolutionary phenomena.
Tropical rain forests deservedly garner much conservation attention, as they may contain half of the world's species. However, a comprehensive strategy for conserving global biodiversity must strive to include the other 50 percent of species and habitats, such that all species and the distinctive ecosystems that support them are conserved. Habitats like tropical dry forests, tundra, polar seas, desert springs and mangroves all harbor unique species, communities, adaptations and phenomena. To lose examples of these assemblages would represent an enormous loss of global biodiversity.
For this reason, the Global 200 aims to represent all of the world's biodiversity by identifying outstanding ecoregions in all of the world's biomes and biogeographic realms. The Global 200 ecoregions represent those ecoregions where WWF is initially focusing its ecoregion conservation efforts to develop biodiversity visions. Ecoregion conservation is currently well underway in many of WWF's Global 200 ecoregions. Learn more about this work in WWF documents and reports from priority ecoregions.
If you are interested in learning more about the Global 200 visit our Wild World site which was developed in collaboration with National Geographic Society.
Read the 2000 BioScience paper (PDF, 1.09M) describing the Global 200.
Read the 2002 Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden paper (PDF, 497k) describing the Global 200.
Download the GIS database (19 MB zipped file)
Download a map of the Global 200 (PDF, 1.64M).
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