Ecoregions 2026: mapping the conservation status of the world's 825 ecoregions

The Ecoregions of North America (excerpt). Resolve, 2017.

The concept of "ecoregions" was introduced by the USGS in the 1980s, and in 2001 a coalition of conservation scientists and geographers led by WWF released the "Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth" (Olson et al. 2001), which became the definitive, globally harmonized data set defining relatively large units of land containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities and species, with boundaries that approximate the original extent of natural communities prior to major land-use change. This has been the most widely reference biogeographical framework over the past two decades, with over 70,000 citations found in wide array of academic journals.

An international consortium of conservation scientists released an updated map of the world’s terrestrial ecoregions in the 2017 paper “An ecoregion-based approach to protecting the terrestrial realm” (Dinerstein et al. 2017). This effort used recent advances in satellite imagery and remote sensing to identify 825 discrete ecoregions of the world (plus 19 for Antarctica), which can be explored through an interactive web application developed by RESOLVE and Google Earth Engine, with detailed ecoregion profiles provided by One Earth. 

In 2025 the Ecoregions Secretariat was formed at the Nature Data Lab to collate numerous recommended revisions that have been submitted over the years, which will improve and refine the ecoregions framework. These changes will be released as a new open-source data set called "Ecoregions 2026", and along with the release an analysis will be undertaken to inventory the remaining natural and seminatural land in each of the ecoregions at 90m resolution, divided by ecological function. This process will result in a data table identifying the ecoregions most in need of conservation and restoration.