The Nature Conservancy's Ecoregional Planning

摘要

To guide its conservation activities, The Nature Conservancy employs ecoregional planning: a comprehensive process for identifying a set of places or areas that, together, represent the majority of species, natural communities, and ecological systems found within a particular eco-region. Ecoregions are large and identifiable, i.e., map-able, landscapes that differ qualitatively from one another in terms of ecology and biological phenomena and are defined by climate, geology, topography and associations of plants and animals. An ecoregional portfolio, i.e., priority sites, the end product of ecoregional planning, is a selected set of areas that represents the full distribution and diversity of these systems. The selection of portfolio sites is guided to a large degree by biological targets. These can be important plants or animals, or biological communities that when conserved result in the preservation of all representative biodiversity.