Environmental representativeness: Regional partitioning and reserve selection

Abstract There is a need to identify and reserve representative areas of national ecosystems. Biological databases available at such a broad scale may be inadequate for this purpose. The success of climatic and edaphic factors in modelling a range of species distributions suggests that these variables may be effective in identifying ecosystems. A classification procedure is proposed that results in an environmental regionalisation and the assignment of values of environmental representatives. These values can be mapped to establish or evaluate reserve networks.

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