A New Map of Life on Earth
Over the past eight years WWF's Conservation Science Program (CSP) has developed a biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. We term our biogeographic units ecoregions, which we define as a relatively large units of land or water containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities sharing a large majority of species, dynamics, and environmental conditions. Ecoregions represent the original distribution of distinct assemblages of species and communities.
There are multiple uses for the terrestrial ecoregion map in our efforts to conserve biodiversity around the world. It provides:
- a map of terrestrial biodiversity that gives enough detail to be useful in global and regional conservation priority-setting and planning efforts.
- a logical biogeographic framework for the development of large-scale conservation strategies.
- a map and descriptions for those working to increase biogeographic literacy and to illustrate conservation issues around the world; including a general description of each ecoregion, outstanding and distinctive biodiversity features, current status and types and severity of threats to the natural habitats.
- a framework for a global species database useful in priority setting and ecological analyses.
In collaboration with National Geographic Society, World Wildlife Fund has created Wild World, an interactive Web site, with photographs, descriptions, and data for the terrestrial ecoregions of the world, as well as the Global 200 ecoregions.
Get more detailed information on the delineation of the terrestrial ecoregions.
Review detailed descriptions and see photos of each of the 825 terrestrial ecoregions.
Read the BioScience paper (PDF, 1.11M) describing the terrestrial ecoregions.
Download the terrestrial ecoregions database. (19 MB zipped file)
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