New highly detailed ecological land units map of the world published

Esri and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) recently announced the development of the highest spatial resolution ecological land units (ELUs) map of the world ever produced.

According to the press release "the Global ELUs map portrays a systematic division and classification of ecological and physiographic information about land surface features. The work was commissioned by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO), and published in print by the Association of American Geographers (AAG)."

“This map provides, for the first time, a web-based, GIS-ready, global ecophysiographic data product for land managers, scientists, conservationists, planners, and the public to use for global and regional scale landscape analysis and accounting,” said Roger Sayre from the USGS. “The Global ELU map advances an objective, repeatable, ‘big data’ approach to the synthesis and classification of important earth surface data layers into distinct and ecologically meaningful land units.”