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Terrestrial ecoregions are land ecoregions, as distinct from freshwater and marine ecoregions. In this context, terrestrial is used to mean "of land" (soil and rock), rather than the more general sense "of Earth" (which includes land and oceans). WWF (World Wildlife Fund) ecologists currently divide the land surface of the Earth into eight ...
This is a list of terrestrial ecoregions as compiled by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The WWF identifies terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecoregions. The terrestrial scheme divides the Earth's land surface into 8 biogeographic realms, containing 867 smaller ecoregions. Each ecoregion is classified into one of 14 major habitat types, or biomes.
A biogeographic realm is the broadest biogeographic division of Earth's land surface, based on distributional patterns of terrestrial organisms. They are subdivided into bioregions, which are further subdivided into ecoregions. A biogeographic realm is also known as "ecozone", although that term may also refer to ecoregions.
Terrestrial ecosystems occupy 55,660,000 mi 2 (144,150,000 km 2), or 28.26% of Earth's surface. [5] Major plant taxa in terrestrial ecosystems are members of the division Magnoliophyta (flowering plants), of which there are about 275,000 species, and the division Pinophyta (conifers), of which there are about 500 species.
Ecoregions may be identified by similarities in geology, physiography, vegetation, climate, soils, land use, wildlife distributions, and hydrology. The classification system has four levels, but only Levels I and III are on this list. Level I divides North America into 15 broad ecoregions; of these, 12 lie partly or wholly within the United States.
California comes in a close second with 13 ecoregions across four biomes in the same realm. By contrast, Rhode Island is the least biodiverse with just one ecoregion—the Northeastern coastal forests—encompassing the entire state. [1] The terrestrial ecoregions of the 50 states of the United States are as follows:
The WWF uses three main classifications: Biogeographic realms (also called ecozones), biomes (also called major habitat types), and ecoregions. [1] [2] Global 200 ecoregions (WWF), 238 single or combined ecoregions identified by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as priorities for conservation. List of terrestrial ecoregions (WWF) 867 terrestrial ...
The Global 200 is the list of ecoregions identified by the World Wide Fund for Nature (), the global conservation organization, as priorities for conservation.According to WWF, an ecoregion is defined as a "relatively large unit of land or water containing a characteristic set of natural communities that share a large majority of their species dynamics, and environmental conditions".