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Contents:
1 - Introduction; 2 - Nature's geometry; 3 - Regional-scale ecosystem units, ecoregions; 4 - An ecoregional approach to sustaining ecosystems; 5 - Significance to ecosystem management; 6 - How land-management agencies, conservation organisations and other use ecoregion maps; 7 - Summary and conclusions; Appendices.
Review:
The idea for classifying land units has a long and venerable history. At its simplest it is the political or tribal area with the boundary marking the division between two or more systems. Although there have been several attempts to produce a 'perfect' classificatory system there is still the notion of boundaries and the need to 'package' a landscape into anthropocentric units. We all use ecosystem (although that term is also under threat). Biome is now acceptable at the global scale. The great advantage is that it is obvious (at least, the type areas are!) and so they make ideal teaching tools. Tropical rain forests look much the same to the untrained eye and so we ignore the divisions. In the 1970s the concept of watershed was put forward: it gained some publicity (and is currently undergoing somewhat of a revival) but it still failed to produce a clear-cut division. By the 1990s we were still no further until, in 1995, this author started to piece together another way of looking at the biosphere.
This text is the third in Bailey's explanation and exposition of the ecoregion concept. The aim here is to introduce the idea to lay readers who want to know more about his ideas without the more detailed text. He also gets the opportunity of putting the work into an applied perspective. The first chapter assumes the reader has little more than a basic idea of ecosystems. We are told about the connections between and within ecosystems and the hierarchical and nested behaviour of ecosystems. Chapter two tackles the notion of scale. Here we start to see how ecoregions might work. Ecosystems are fine to study but as applied conservation units we need to accept that the ecosystem is linked to other, largely similar, units. Failure to recognise this has left us with unsustainable use of ecosystems (such as the example given of developing semi-arid areas for housing). This is not helped by the ecosystem being the unit on conservation activity whereas, according to Bailey, the functional unit is the ecoregion (with the suggestion that favouring one and ignoring the other is heading for problems). Chapter three starts to expand on the ecoregion approach. There's a chance to compare ecoregions with other mapping units. We get to see the factors that differentiate ecoregions and some idea of how we can classify via ecoregions. Chapter four demonstrates how an ecoregion approach can be used to create sustainable ecosystems. This latter term might, at first, seem confusing but really Bailey is arguing for (local) ecosystem conservation management but set within a regional (i.e. ecoregional) context. Isolated conservation won't work. As if to illustrate this point, chapter five describes the use of ecoregions to environmental problems whilst chapter six goes one stage further and shows how actual US organisations use real ecoregion maps in practice. Chapter seven provides a summary and an idea of how and where this concept could develop. A range of appendices given more detail about ecoregion characteristics.
Overall, this is a very useful text. It describes ecoregions in ways in which they could be understood easily by the lay person. To assist this, the text is excellently illustrated using a wide variety of sources (postcards, photographs, maps etc.) which help to emphasise the utility of the ecoregion concept. Although it is purely US focussed (it is, after all, a US concept) it could very easily be translated to other areas (as some global conservation organisations are already doing). Given that this concept is only likely to gain in importance, this should be seen as the key introductory text. It deserves the widest readership.