Ecozone - Definition and Overview

Ecozone is a classification system of the world first proposed by Miklos Udvardy under the name biogeographical realms for conservation purposes.

It defines 8 biogeographical realms with unifying features of geography, fauna and flora.

• Nearctic 22.9 mil. km² (including most of North America)
• Palearctic 54.1 mil. km² (including the bulk of Eurasia and North Africa)
• Afrotropic 22.1 mil. km² (including Sub-Saharan Africa)
• Indomalaya 7.5 mil. km² (including the South Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia)
• Australasia 7.7 mil. km² (including Australia, New Guinea, and neighbouring islands)
• Neotropic 19.0 mil. km² (including South America and the Caribbean)
• Oceania 1.0 mil. km² (including Polynesia, Fiji and Micronesia)
• Antarctic 0.3 mil. km² (including Antarctica)

Udvardy originally further divided the biogeographic realms into 203 biogeographical provinces.

Intensive regional analyses of biodiversity patterns across five continents and biogeographical realms have been used by the World Wildlife Fund to defined the boundaries of terrestrial ecoregions for the Global 200.

The biogeographic realms are also supporting current natural World Heritage sites.

External links

• Map of the ecozones (http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/where_we_work/ecoregions/global200/pages/mainmap.htm)