This richly illustrated volume completes Robert G. Bailey's celebrated study of ecoregions, begun in the landmark Ecosystem Geography (1996) and further articulated in Ecoregions (1998). In this third installment, the author expands his system for defining large-scale ecological zones to encompass principles of land management, regional planning, and design. In an engaging, nontechnical discussion, he shows how larger patterns and processes that characterize a region--its climate, topography, soils, vegetation, fauna, and human culture--provide essential keys to the sustainability of...

and management is presently undergoing enormous change: away L from managing single resources to managing ecosystems. From f- est to tundra, to desert, to steppe, the world s ecosystems vary vastly. To manage them effectively we need to understand their geographic d- tribution better. We need to do this at various levels of detail because ecosystems exist at multiple scales in a hierarchy, from regional to local. Maps are needed to display ecosystem distribution and hierarchy. Until now, information on de?ning ecosystem boundaries has been scarce. This book is the ?rst to clarify and...

Global warming and human-driven impacts are changing the World s ecological zones. This book applies the principles described in Bailey s Ecosystem Geography: From Ecoregions to Sites, 2nd ed. (Springer 2009, 1st ed. 1996) to describe and characterize the major terrestrial and aquatic ecological zones of the Earth. Bailey s system for classifying these zones has been adopted by major organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy and this book is a significant contribution to a long tradition of classifying and studying the world s ecological regions or ecoregions....