Mounting global concern over the conservation status of the world's biodiversity, especially at ecosystem and species levels, has led to calls for increasing the extent of protected areas and for identifying priority areas for conservation. Although most decisions to establish protected areas are made at the national level, international perspectives are necessary both to assess the status of ecosystems occurring in more than one country and to target the use of international resources. Species and ecosystems are not contained by political boundaries, and international cooperation is essential to ensure their preservation.
One means of establishing priorities for conservation is analysis of the degree to which existing networks of protected areas are representative of the full range of ecosystems and species. At the national level, detailed ecosystem or vegetation classifications can provide a basis for assessing the representativeness of the existing protected areas network. Provided that the data are available it is also possible to carry out a study of this nature on a global level. Up until now the data were not available.
Several studies have highlighted the status of forest protection and decline for particular regions using some version of ecological zones (e.g. Lysenko et al., 1995, Mackinnon, 1996). Although the FAO have compiled data on forest resources globally (e.g. FAO 1995), the methodology used has differed between developed and developing countries. A more uniform approach to the forests of the different regions of the world is called for (Päivinen 1996). The World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) recently produced an analysis of protection of ecological zones in the tropics (Murray et al. 1996), using the system of ecofloristic zones developed for FAO. In 1996 Iremonger et al. wrote a global analysis; the extent of current forest cover in each ecological zone was determined and the protection of that existing forest cover was assessed (FAO, 1997). This latter study was possible because WCMC had completed a digital map of the world's forests at a clear enough resolution for the work. However, in the study the forest was not subdivided into different forest types, and an overlay of ecological zones coverages was used as a surrogate for these. The assumption in that study was that vegetation occurring in different ecological zones belongs to different ecological types.
The present study builds upon the work carried out by Iremonger et al. (1997). The digital world forest coverage was subdivided into different broad forest types, and the ecological zones coverages were used as an overlay to define in even more detail the ecological variants of each forest type. The differences in scales and resolutions upon which the forest data sets and the ecological zones data sets were based, meant that the results of combining zones and forest types was not always meaningful. A more in-depth analysis of the reasons for the results obtained would be very useful and eliminate misleading combinations (e.g., thorn forest in the Tropical wet ecological zone) that may seem like rare and unique forest variants.
Having created such detailed forest coverages for each region of the world, it was possible to compare forest area to the population figures. Some preliminary test extrapolations were attempted.
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