and management is presently undergoing enormous change: away L from managing single resources to managing ecosystems. From f- est to tundra, to desert, to steppe, the world’s ecosystems vary vastly. To manage them effectively we need to understand their geographic d- tribution better. We need to do this at various levels of detail because ecosystems exist at multiple scales in a hierarchy, from regional to local. Maps are needed to display ecosystem distribution and hierarchy. Until now, i...

Global warming and human-driven impacts are changing the World’s ecological zones. This book applies the principles described in Bailey’s Ecosystem Geography: From Ecoregions to Sites, 2nd ed. (Springer 2009, 1st ed. 1996) to describe and characterize the major terrestrial and aquatic ecological zones of the Earth. Bailey’s system for classifying these zones has been adopted by major organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy and this book is a significant con...