As the United Nations develops a post-2020 global biodiversity framework for the Convention on Biological Diversity, attention is focusing on how new goals and targets for ecosystem conservation might serve its vision of ‘living in harmony with nature’. Advancing dual imperatives to conserve biodiversity and sustain ecosystem services requires reliable and resilient generalizations and predictions about ecosystem responses to environmental change and management. Ecosystems vary in their biota, service provision and relative exposure to risks, yet there is no globally consistent classification of ecosystems that reflects functional responses to change and management. This hampers progress on developing conservation targets and sustainability goals.
Here we present the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Global Ecosystem Typology, a conceptually robust, scalable, spatially explicit approach for generalizations and predictions about functions, biota, risks and management remedies across the entire biosphere. The outcome of a major cross-disciplinary collaboration, this novel framework places all of Earth’s ecosystems (terrestrial, freshwater, marine, subterranean) into a unifying theoretical context to guide the transformation of ecosystem policy and management from global to local scales. This new information infrastructure will support knowledge transfer for ecosystem-specific management and restoration, globally standardized ecosystem risk assessments, natural capital accounting and progress on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.
NatureServe staff helped develop the ecosystem types and have formed a work group, including IUCN team members, to strengthen integration of NatureServe’s International Vegetation Classification with the IUCN typology.
The upper levels of the IUCN typology are organized by realms (circles) and biomes (terms inside the circles). Each of the realms overlap, creating transitional realms. For simplicity, the subterranean realm not shown.