Ecoregion

Discussion

What is the difference between a Bioregion and a Ecoregion?

Mark Whitaker explains:

"The number of approximately 1,100 ecoregions is not 'bioregions'

(with "bioregions" defined as human cultural regions of natural/environmental affinity over time; like the bayou culture of French Acadians in Louisiana, or the dry desert areas of Spain for cattle raising and meat curing; or the Swiss alps and milk/cheese production, etc., and yodeling...; or the Plains Indians and buffalo hunting culture--once they got the horses from the Spanish in the 1500s. Bioregions are unique historical human-ecological-subsistence relationships with deep cultural meaning as well.)

For the other term, "ecoregions":

Ecoregions are defined more biologically and ecologically without reference to people; ecoregions are the unique flora, fauna, soil and microclimate ecological relationships in the world, that makes a unique places of ecological life on earth--slightly different than their neighboring ecoregions over time. These have only been mapped from around 2001 onward in any first tries.

My total of 1,000 includes both these terrestrial ecoregions and the marine ecoregions (themselves only mapped from around 2007) for:

~1,099 territorial commonalities in ~1,099 total land  AND marine ecoregions worldwide 

The phrase “TEOW” (Olson et al., 2001) is the abbreviation for “terrestrial ecoregions of the world.” There are approximately 846 to 867 terrestrial ecoregions depending on classification criteria.

The phrase “MEOW” (Spalding et al., 2007) is the abbreviation for “marine eco-regions of the world.” Currently, these are demarcated as 232 oceanic coastal ‘benthic’ zones (with ‘benthic’ defined as the many unique marine ecologies in coastal zones worldwide, measured to an ocean depth of 200 meters). The 232 marine ecoregions already are arranged in their own nested hydrological units with 12 marine biogeographic realms, 62 marine provinces, and 232 base marine ecoregions. This makes any of the 232 marine ecoregion identifiable easily for its own nested marine qualities by merging numbers for biographic realms, then, provinces, and then marine ecoregions. ...

...Totaling up this rich ecological variety, this means the total land ecoregions and the total oceanic benthic ecoregions of glomo 2 are approximately 1,100 (~867 terrestrial ecoregions + 232 marine benthic ecoregions = ~1,099 land/marine ecoregions). Both land ecoregions and marine ecoregions of glomo 2 get nested feedback and improvement from the three common watershed-based glomo levels of 5, 4, and 3. Due to the real-world empirical variety of sizes of terrestrial and marine ecoregions of glomo 2, there are sometimes vast differences in geographic size or internal human population compared to each other"..."

(email, February 2025)