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Track: Natural Resources and Conservation
Roger Sayre
The Nature Conservancy
1815 N Lynn St
Arlington, VA 22209
Telephone: 703-841-4211
Fax: 703-841-2722
E-mail: rsayre@tnc.org
Xiaojun Li
An Ecoregional Conservation Strategy for Latin America and the Caribbean
Two recent biodiversity priority setting initiatives undertaken by The World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have emphasized the delineation of ecoregions for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and an assignment of biodiversity importance values to these ecoregions. A total of 191 terrestrial ecoregions resulted from these two parallel initiatives. The World Bank and USAID are now using these ecoregion priority assessments to help determine project placements and conservation allocations. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has formulated a strategy for biodiversity conservation in LAC, which reorganizes these ecoregions into a set of 41 ecoregional conservation units. This simplification of the ecoregional classification hierarchy permits the design of portfolios of sites that collectively capture the representative habitat diversity throughout the region. A network of 61 protected areas in LAC (the Parks-in-Peril program, a joint TNC/USAID initiative) is assessed for
its contribution to the protection of these ecoregional conservation units. A bias toward protection of tropical moist broadleaf forests is documented; other environments (xeric, subtropical coniferous) are found to be substantially under represented.
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