A partnership between the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy has created the Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, a map of the “global biogeographic regionalization of the Earth’s freshwater biodiversity.” The ecoregion map brings together species data and is meant to be a tool for regional and global conservation planning.
This project is the first to map freshwater on a global scale, connecting the regions to biodiversity and threat data. Freshwater ecosystems are defined as large areas that encompass, “one or more freshwater systems that contains a distinct assemblage of natural freshwater communities and species. The freshwater species, dynamics, and environmental conditions within a given ecoregion are more similar to each other than to those of surrounding ecoregions and together form a conservation unit.”
The website contains a GIS shapefile download of the freshwater ecoregions, including metadata. There’s also a KML download for viewing in Google Earth. The freshwater ecoregion map serves as a complement to the global terrestrial and marine ecoregion maps.
