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Washington's Ecoregions
Biodiversity is expressed at several different levels of organization, including genes, species, and ecosystems. These are rarely, if ever, organized along political boundaries such as city, county, or state lines! Ecologists look at the diversity of our ecosystems and see patterns in how they are distributed over the landscape. That is, broad ecological patterns in vegetation, soils, geology, hydrology, landforms, and natural disturbance can be delineated geographically as "ecoregions." Washington is a highly diverse state, with portions of nine ecoregions located within its boundaries. Ecoregions are the basis for an important conservation planning tool: the Ecoregional Assessment. The Nature Conservancy, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Washington Department of Natural Resources, and other partners have developed Ecoregional Assessments for each of Washington’s nine ecoregions. Ecoregional Assessments help communities, landowners, conservation planners, agencies, and organizations prioritize areas that will most benefit biodiversity conservation at a statewide scale. For more on the Ecoregional Assessments and how to access them, please click here. Smaller geographic divisions, such as watersheds, are useful for local conservation planning, but to generate shared priorities across the state and to coordinate conservation efforts, the ecoregion is proving to be a practical unit. The ecoregion boundaries used here are those of the Washington Natural Heritage Plan, as originally developed by The Nature Conservancy and its partners on the basis of work by Robert G. Bailey and other scholars.
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