The Global 200: Priority Ecoregions for Global Conservation

A global strategy to conserve biodiversity must aim to protect representative examples of all of the world's ecosystems, as well as those areas that contain exceptional concentrations of species and endemics. Although lacking the richness of tropical forests, deserts, tropical lakes, and subpolar seas all contain distinct species, communities, and ecological phenomena. We analyzed global patterns of biodiversity to identify a set of the Earth's terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecoregions that harbor exceptional biodiversity and are representative of its ecosystems. We placed each of the Earth's ecoregions within a system of 30 biomes and biogeographic realms to facilitate a representation analysis.…