Wetland Area Protected Under Ramsar Convention (2007) by Freshwater Ecoregion

Area of wetlands in each freshwater ecoregion protected under Ramsar Convention.

We derived the area of wetlands of international importance protected under the Ramsar Convention in each freshwater ecoregion from a subset of areas included in the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) compiled by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP/IUCN 2007). All Ramsar sites in the database were included, except those known to be purely marine in extent, as indicated by the Marine Classes noted as subtidal in the WDPA. Intertidal marine Ramsar sites, however, are included in the analysis because the sites may include both brackish and fresh-waters. Area attributes for those Ramsar sites within the WDPA that were only available as point data were aggregated for each ecoregion, and each point was counted in only one ecoregion. In a very few cases where in reality Ramsar boundaries cross ecoregion boundaries, we assigned the entire area of the site to the single ecoregion in which the WDPA point was located.

These data were derived by The Nature Conservancy, and were displayed in a map published in The Atlas of Global Conservation (Hoekstra et al., University of California Press, 2010). More information at http://nature.org/atlas.

Data derived from:
UN Environment Programme (UNEP)/International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). 2007. Protected areas extracted from the 2007 World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA). The WDPA is a joint product of UNEP and the IUCN, prepared by UNEP-WCMC and the IUCN WCPA working with Governments, the Secretariats of MEAs, and collaborating NGOs. For further information, contact protectedareas@unep-wcmc.org or go to www
.WDPA.org