Marine ecoregion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Marine ecoregion is a region of the world's oceans, as defined by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and The Nature Conservancy, to aid in conservation activities for marine ecosystems.
The WWF/Nature Conservancy scheme groups the individual ecoregions into 12 marine realms, which represent the broad latitudinal divisions of polar, temperate, and tropical seas, with subdivisions based on ocean basins (except for the southern hemisphere temperate oceans, which are based on continents). The marine realms are subdivided into 62 marine provinces, which include one or more of the 232 marine ecoregions.
The scheme used to designate and classify marine ecoregions is analogous to the classification system used by WWF for terrestrial ecoregions. The marine realms correspond to the terrestrial ecozones. Major habitat types are identified—polar, temperate shelves and seas, temperate upwelling, tropical upwelling, tropical coral, pelagic (trades and westerlies), abyssal, and hadal (ocean trench) —which correspond to the terrestrial biomes. The WWF/Nature Conservancy scheme currently encompasses only coastal and continental shelf areas; ecoregions of the deep oceans have not yet been delineated.
See List of marine ecoregions for a full list of coastal and continental shelf ecoregions.
A similar system of identifying areas of the oceans for conservation purposes is the system of large marine ecosystems (LMEs), developed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
[edit] References
- Spalding, Mark D., Helen E. Fox, Gerald R. Allen, Nick Davidson et al. "Marine Ecoregions of the World: A Bioregionalization of Coastal and Shelf Areas". Bioscience Vol. 57 No. 7, July/August 2007, pp. 573-583. [1]
