The Terrestrial Ecoregions dataset offers a comprehensive overview of terrestrial ecosystems and is a valuable resource for biodiversity conservation planning, providing insights based on natural geographical and ecological boundaries rather than political ones. Utilizing recent biogeographical data, this dataset can aid in modern conservation efforts. It includes details on habitat status, with classifications such as "Half Protected," "Nature Could Reach Half," "Nature Could Recover," and "Nature Imperiled," to guide strategic conservation actions.
Ecoregions, in the simplest definition, are ecosystems of regional extent. Specifically, ecoregions represent distinct assemblages of biodiversity-all taxa, not just vegetation-whose boundaries include the space required to sustain ecological processes. Ecoregions provide a useful basemap for conservation planning in particular because they draw on natural, rather than political, boundaries, define distinct biogeographic assemblages and ecological habitats within biomes, and assist in representation of Earth's biodiversity.
This dataset is based on recent advances in biogeography - the science concerning the distribution of plants and animals. The original ecoregions dataset has been widely used since its introduction in 2001, underpinning the most recent analyses of the effects of global climate change on nature by ecologists to the distribution of the world's beetles to modern conservation planning.
The 846 terrestrial ecoregions are grouped into 14 biomes and 8 realms. Six of these biomes are forest biomes and the remaining eight are non-forest biomes. For the forest biomes, the geographic boundaries of the ecoregions (Dinerstein et al., 2017) and protected areas (UNEP-WCMC 2016) were intersected with the Global Forest Change data (Hansen et al. 2013) for the years 2000 to 2015, to calculate percent of habitat in protected areas and percent of remaining habitat outside protected areas. Likewise, the boundaries of the non-forest ecoregions and protected areas (UNEP-WCMC 2016) were intersected with Anthropogenic Biomes data (Anthromes v2) for the year 2000 (Ellis et al., 2010) to identify remaining habitats inside and outside the protected areas. Each ecoregion has a unique ID, area (sq. degrees), and NNH (Nature Needs Half) categories 1-4. NNH categories are based on percent of habitat in protected areas and percent of remaining habitat outside protected areas.
The updated Ecoregions 2017 is the most-up-to-date (as of February 2018) dataset on remaining habitat in each terrestrial ecoregion. It was released to chart progress towards achieving the visionary goal of Nature Needs Half, to protect half of all the land on Earth to save a living terrestrial biosphere.