The World's Protected Areas

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Extensively illustrated with maps, color photographs, and graphics, this state-of-the-art reference offers a comprehensive and authoritative status report on the world's 60,000 parks, nature reserves, and other land and marine areas currently designated as protected areas.

Now covering about 12 percent of the Earth's surface, protected areas provide a wide range of valuable ecological benefits: they contribute to biodiversity conservation; supply food, water, and other resources; regulate weather patterns; contain potential medicines; generate income at local, regional, and national levels through tourism; and more.

This timely volume offers a benchmark overview of where these protected areas exist worldwide, what they have and have not accomplished, what threats they face, and how they can be better managed to achieve the goals of conserving biodiversity and other natural resources.