An updated protected areas database for the United States and Canada

Protecting biodiversity in a network of reserves has been a major goal of c onservationists for more than a century. However, efforts in Canada and the United States to report on progress in meeting protection goals have been hampered by a lack of standardized protected areas inventories. We present an updated protected areas database that is useful for tracking protection goals at various spatial scales (e.g., state, province, country, ecoregion, and biome). Using the database, just 5.1% and 6.5% of the land area of the United States and Canada, respectively, have been set aside in strictly pr otected reserves; an additional 5.3% and 0.9% of each nation, respectively, is in more relaxed levels of protection characterized by greater human act ivities. Amount of protection for individual states ranged from <1.0% for m ost of the eastern and central United States to 35.3% for Alaska, and from 1.6% for Newfoundland and Labrador to roughly 11.0% for British Columbia. T hirty ecoregions considered to have globally outstanding levels of biodiver sity totaled 8.2% of land area protected. Most (97%) individual protected a reas were <10,000 ha, and only a small proportion (0.53%) were >100,000 ha. Our results illustrate the importance of standardizing and periodically up dating national protected areas databases to accurately report on progress in meeting national conservation targets.