An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm

By E. Dinerstein, David P. Olson, A. Joshi, C. Vynne, N. Burgess, E. Wikramanayake, Nathan R. Hahn, Suzanne Palminteri, Prashant Hedao, R. Noss and 39 more. BioScience, 2017

2,067 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We assess progress toward the protection of 50% of the terrestrial biosphere to address the species-extinction crisis and conserve a global ecological heritage for future generations. Using a map of Earth's 846 terrestrial ecoregions, we show that 98 ecoregions (12%) exceed Half Protected; 313 ecoregions (37%) fall short of Half Protected but have sufficient unaltered habitat remaining to reach the target; and 207 ecoregions (24%) are in peril, where an average of only 4% of natural habitat remains. We propose a Global Deal for Nature—a companion to the Paris Climate Deal—to promote increased habitat protection and restoration, national- and ecoregion-scale conservation strategies, and the empowerment of indigenous peoples to protect their sovereign lands. The goal of such an accord would be to protect half the terrestrial realm by 2050 to halt the extinction crisis while sustaining human livelihoods.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6cd4eebe0fa4eda8444ecffbdb0acac50bbe59e

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Change in terrestrial human footprint drives continued loss of intact ecosystems (2020, neutral): “These entities are now critical for policy and decision makers, being considered core units of reporting in global treaties, and as such can direct legislation, management, and conservation efforts toward crisis locations and ecosystems.(6,30,31,112,113) We use biomes and ecoregions described by Ols”
People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years (2021, background): “(49), including “Olson Biomes” [recently updated as the Resolve 2017 biomes (74)], vertebrate species richness (55), the number of vertebrate species threatened with extinction (55), KBAs (54), terrestrial protected areas [World Database of Protected Areas (52) supplemented with data for Chinese pro”
Dynamic World, Near real-time global 10 m land use land cover mapping (2022, methodology): “We further divided each region by the 14 RESOLVE Ecoregions biomes 22 .”
What Do We Know about Botryosphaeriaceae? An Overview of a Worldwide Cured Dataset (2021, background): “To understand the distribution of the main Botryosphaeriaceae species, we analyzed their spatial distributions over continents and terrestrial ecoregions [42,43].”
The interaction of human population, food production, and biodiversity protection (2017, positive): “Looking toward the future, conservation scientists contend that if humanity wishes to conserve Earth’s biodiversity, protecting large areas of terrestrial and marine habitats is needed (61, 62).”
Global 10 m Land Use Land Cover Datasets: A Comparison of Dynamic World, World Cover and Esri Land Cover (2022, methodology): “Biomes were defined using the RESOLVE bioregions dataset [28], while human settlement type was derived from the Global Human Settlement Layers, Settlement Grid [29].”
A global-level assessment of the effectiveness of protected areas at resisting anthropogenic pressures (2019, neutral): “(57): 1) the Afrotropics, 2) Australasia, 3) Indomalaya, 4) the Nearctic, 5) the Neotropics, and 6) the Palearctic.”
Global land use / land cover with Sentinel 2 and deep learning (2021, methodology): “For this, we use over 24,000 5km x 5km image chips that were handlabeled into ten classes (water, trees, grass, flooded vegetation, crops, scrub/shrub, built area, bare ground, snow/ice, and clouds) and collected across 14 major biomes (as defined in [7]) employing a random stratified sampling appro”