In light of limited conservation funding, global conservation initiatives are increasingly focused on regions of the planet that have been identified as valuable on the basis of their species diversity, the vulnerability of resident species to extinction, or the perceived pristine nature of their ecosystems. Regions that have been resilient to high rates of extinction have not yet been systematically considered in conservation...

7Massive fires in Indonesian peatlands in the 1990s and in eastern Russian peatlands in 2002 and last year have highlighted the need to manage forests overlying peat deposits, as well as converted peat forests and open peatlands. Peat or peaty soils, contain 65% or more of partially decayed vegetation, can burn freely or underground. They cover some 10 percent of worldwide forests and contain 25 percent of all terrestrial carb...

The potential for conservation of individual species has been greatly advanced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) development of objective, repeatable, and transparent criteria for assessing extinction risk that explicitly separate risk assessment from priority setting. At the IV World Conservation Congress in 2008, the process began to develop and implement comparable global standards for ecosystem...

Human impacts on the natural environment have reached such proportions that in addition to an ‘extinction crisis’, we now also face a broader ‘biome crisis’. Here we identify the world's terrestrial biomes and, at a finer spatial scale, ecoregions in which biodiversity and ecological function are at greatest risk because of extensive habitat conversion and limited habitat protection. Habitat conversion exceeds habitat protecti...