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View the Ecoregions in Google Earth

Pacific Northwest Coast
Willamette Valley – Puget Trough –  Georgia Basin
North Cascades and Pacific Ranges
West Cascades
East Cascades
Okanagan
Columbia Plateau
Canadian Rocky Mountains
Middle Rockies – Blue Mountains


The Nature Conservancy, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Washington Department of Natural Resources, and other partners have developed Ecoregional Assessments for each of Washington’s nine ecoregions.

Ecoregional assessments provide a regional scale, biodiversity-based context for implementing conservation efforts. They identify ecologically significant areas for conservation action with a goal of protecting representative biodiversity. These actions may be any of a range of strategies, including: incentives for private landowners; acknowledging and encouraging best management practices on working landscapes; restoring degraded ecosystems, and putting land in conservation easements. They are the result of rigorous scientific analyses, incorporating an extensive expert review, and are the most comprehensive and current efforts to set conservation priorities at a regional scale.

These assessments have each resulted in a series of products useful to those working to conserve biodiversity in the Pacific Northwest. These products can be used alone, in conjunction with one another, or with other information to enhance real-world conservation and communication about biodiversity values in the region. The main products developed are:

• A portfolio of priority conservation areas, highlighting the most important and suitable areas for conservation of ecoregional biodiversity. Each portfolio is comprised of terrestrial and freshwater priorities, as well as marine priorities for coastal ecoregions.
• Maps of relative conservation value of all lands and waters in each ecoregion.
• A compilation of the comprehensive biodiversity information and data that were used to develop the assessment.
• A thorough documentation of the assessment process, portfolio identification and site prioritization methods, and data management, so that future iterations of the assessments can build upon previous work.

For more information on our Ecoregional Assessments, please contact , Conservation Information Manager, The Nature Conservancy.