Ecoregions in Context: a Critique with Special Reference to Indonesia

World Wildlife Fund–United States (WWF) is promoting an ecoregional framework internationally as a new hierarchical approach to organizing and prioritizing conservation efforts. We assessed WWF ecoregions against existing frameworks: (1) the Dasmann‐Udvardy (World Conservation Union [IUCN]) Biogeographical Representation Framework, (2) the Bailey Ecoregional Framework (U.S. Forest Service), and (3) the hotspot approach, as exemplified by the BirdLife Endemic Bird Area Approach and the WWF–IUCN Centres of Plant Diversity Program. We examined the genealogy of the schemes from three perspectives: methodological explicitness, transparency and repeatability, and whether the WWF–ecoregions system improves on existing schemes. We considered Indonesia as a case study and assessed the efficacy of each system in the Indonesian context. The existing planning frameworks achieved their objective; in general had explicit, transparent, and repeatable methods; and, in the case of the Dasmann‐Udvardy system, attained an institutional reality in Indonesia. The central purpose of the WWF–ecoregions framework is the same as the 25‐year‐old Dasmann‐Udvardy system, and at the coarsest spatial scales it relies on similar spatial delineators (biomes and faunal regions). The WWF methodology, however, employs a gestalt approach to defining ecoregion boundaries. In the Indonesian context the resulting map appears problematic both in terms of the underlying rationale of the ecoregion approach and in terms of apparent conflict with preexisting protected‐area design. We suggest, insofar as refined planning frameworks are needed, that an alternative route that builds on rather than competes with existing approaches would be to combine at the mesoscale the landform delineators that characterize the Bailey ecoregion system with the existing macroscale ecoclimatic and biogeographic delineators of the Dasmann‐Udvardy system. We question the investment in developing and promoting the WWF–ecoregion scheme in Indonesia when the existing Dasmann‐Udvardy system, used in conjunction with hotspot studies, provides a seemingly adequate system and when the reserve system itself is under considerable pressure.