Explore a Tapestry of World Ecosystems

The United States Geological Survey has published a new global ecosystems map of unprecedented detail that lets you explore a tapestry of World ecosystems. The map was produced by a team led by Roger Sayre, Ph.D., Senior Scientist for Ecosystems at the USGS Land Change Science Program. It is a mosaic of almost 4,000 unique ecological areas called Ecological Land Units (ELUs) based on four factors that are key in determining the makeup of ecosystems. Three of these—bioclimate, landforms, and rock type—are physical phenomena that drive the formation of soils and the distribution of vegetation. The fourth, land cover, is the vegetation that is found in a location as a response to the physical factors. This Story Map Journal has two main features, an ecosystems browser and an ecosystem tour. In the ecosystem browser, point and click at any location on the map and the name of that ecosystem appears in a pop-up box. In general, tans are deserts, yellows and light greens are savannas, darker greens are forests, mountainous regions have texture, reddish is warm and bluish is cold. The browser includes pan and zoom functions. The ecosystem tour starts on the next page of this map journal. It features places on Earth where the diversity of Ecological Facets (EFs), the building blocks of ELUs, is highly concentrated in an area. The world is divided up into 3.5 billion cells, each one 250 meters on a side, and each of these cells represents one of 47,500 types of EFs. The areas described in the following pages are all locations with relatively high numbers of EFs. While these are areas of high ecological landscape diversity, they are not necessarily areas of high biodiversity. Many EFs have naturally low species diversity, or have been heavily modified by human activity. The areas in the ecosystem tour below include many interesting and beautiful locations that are widely scattered across our hugely diverse planet.