ConserveOnline - Ecoregional Shapefiles (Terrestrial, Marine, and Freshwater Ecoregions)

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List of TNC's ecoregions (terrestrial, marine, and freshwater), 12/2/08: This Excel workbook has a list of all of TNC's ecoregions, with the new unique ecoregional id, old Eco_code, ecoregion name, realm, and MHT (and province for marine). The first worksheet is a list of TNC's terrestrial ecoregions. The second worksheet is a list of TNC's marine ecoregions (from the MEOW), and the third is a layer of TNC's freshwater ecoregions (from the FEOW).
Ecoregional Assessments: For information on TNC's Ecoregional Assessments, please visit the Ecoregional Assessment Status Tool (EAST).; To view spatial data for ecoregional assessments (or to view map services for TNC's core conservation data), please go to http://maps.tnc.org.

To download the data for ecoregions, you can use the links below.
Marine Ecoregions of the World (MEOW) shapefile 10/7/08: The digital ecoregions layer is available for download as an ArcGIS Shapefile. It has been compressed using WinZip (www.winzip.com). This spatial data layer is available for use for valid scientific, conservation, and educational purposes. We ask that you refer to the metadata for further details, and that you cite and credit the Marine Ecoregions data as follows:
Spalding MD, Fox HE, Allen GR, Davidson N, Ferdaña ZA, Finlayson M, Halpern BS, Jorge MA, Lombana A, Lourie SA, Martin KD, McManus E, Molnar J, Recchia CA, Robertson J (2007) Marine Ecoregions of the World: a bioregionalization of coast and shelf areas. BioScience 57: 573-583

Any modification of the original map to ecoregion boundaries, units, names, or realm and province classes must be noted and explained alongside the original citation.
Further details about the MEOW system and PDFs of the BioScience paper the comprehensive listing of sources are available from:
www.worldwildlife.org/MEOW/
www.nature.org/MEOW

Users please note – shapefile does NOT accurately represent outer MEOW boundaries: As specified in the original publications, the boundaries in this shapefile have been extended out some 200 nautical miles from land (and this buffer is extended to include any additional marine areas less than 200metres in depth which lie beyond this distance). This outer boundary buffer is primarily drawn here to ease visibility of ecoregions in global and regional scale maps. Similarly the inland boundaries of the ecoregions extend far inland – a convention to ensure inclusion of any coastline and estuarine/lagoonal systems which may be derived from different map sources. As specified, the ecoregional classification relates primarily to coast and shelf biotas for which a 200m depth contour is a more accurate indicative boundary. It is therefore not an appropriate use of the data to calculate total ecoregion areas or generate other area or volumetric dependent statistics using these boundaries alone. A version of the shapefile cut to shelf areas will be released on this site by December 2007.

TNC users please note: TNC has adopted the Marine Ecoregions of the World as our marine ecoregional boundaries, but in some cases around North America we are using older and slightly different boundaries for ecoregional planning. These other boundaries can be found in the marine ecoregional assessment layer directly below on this page.
Freshwater Ecoregions of the World (FEOW) Shapefile, TNC version 12/3/08: Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, (FEOW) provides a new global biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's freshwater biodiversity. Covering virtually all freshwater habitats on Earth, this first-ever ecoregion map, together with associated species data, is a useful tool for underpinning global and regional conservation planning efforts, particularly to identify outstanding and imperiled freshwater systems; for serving as a logical framework for large-scale conservation strategies; and for providing a global-scale knowledge base for increasing freshwater biogeographic literacy.

This version of the FEOW, modified by The Nature Conservancy, includes additional tabular data describing Major Habitat Types (MHTs, similar to terrestrial biomes). These MHTs were developed by TNC and WWF, Inc., but have not undergone rigorous review and are as of yet unpublished. All ecoregions are nested within the eleven MHTs' boundaries.

You can read more about the FEOW, and obtain the unmodified shapefile at http://www.feow.org.
Terrestrial Ecoregional Boundaries Shapefile (TNC), 12/14/09: This is the master spatial data layer for TNC's terrestrial ecoregions of the world, exported from the geodatabase listed above. Note that it includes Mangroves, Inland Water, and Rock and Ice MHTs, although they are not being handled by terrestrial assessments. This version has undergone substantial updates, and was split from the ecoregional assessment layer in June 2008. This is a zip file including the shapefile and word document that indicates changes that have been made to the data since September 2005. This is a SHAPEFILE version of the data, which is identical to the geodatabase layer.

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