Protected Areas in Grasslands
| Analytical Overview |
| This map shows spatial extent of grassland protected areas. For protected areas represented by points only, we generated circular buffers corresponding to the reported size of the protected area. In a comparison of protected areas within other ecosystems, forests and agriculture ecosystems include 2.5 million km² and 1.6 million km² of protected area, respectively. Grassland ecosystems include more protected area—nearly 4 million km², but because grassland extent is so large only 7.6 percent of the grassland ecosystem area is protected while approximately 8.5 percent of the forest ecosystem area is protected. The protected grasslands that do exist cover the largest area in Sub-Saharan Africa - 1.3 million km² - and less than 1 million km² in the remaining regions ranging from 56,000 km² in Central America and the Caribbean to 791,000 km² in North America. One biome within grasslands has been described as the least protected biome in the world: only 0.69% of the world’s temperate grasslands are protected under the global system of protected areas. |
Map Projection
Interrupted Goode's Homolosine
Map Description
This map shows the extent and distribution of large (at least 10 km²) protected areas (in Categories l, ll, or lll) that are at least 50 percent grassland. The results show 697 protected grasslands worldwide. This translates to less than 16 percent of 4,502 relatively large protected areas being composed of at least 50 percent grassland.
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Citation:
World Resources Institute - PAGE, 2000
Sources:
- World Conservation Monitoring Centre. 1999, Protected Areas Database. Cambridge, UK:WCMC.Unpublished data.
- GLCCD, 1998. Loveland, T.R., B.C. Reed, J.F. Brown, D.O. Ohlen, Z. Zhu, L. Yang, and J. Merchant. 1998. "Development of a Global Land Cover Characteristics Database and IGBP DISCover from 1-km AVHRR Data" In International Journal of Remote Sensing21(6-7): 1303-1330.
Available On-line at: Source Link.Global Land Cover Characteristics Database, Version 1.2..