Over the last several years, the IUCN Red List approach for assessing the risk of extinction faced by species has been adapted into a Red List of Ecosystems methodology. This endeavor faces several important challenges, including how to define the types of ecosystems to which the Red List criteria are applied, and how to manage information on the geographic distribution of ecosystems in an open, transparent, and standardized manner linking mapping, typology, and field studies. We propose a fundamentally novel approach that differs from currently available ecosystem typologies in three important aspects by (1) offering a new way of conceptualizing types of ecosystems, (2) providing an explicit method for communicating the conceptualized ecosystems and how they are circumscribed, and (3) developing technical tools for managing the resulting conceptual model. Firstly, ecosystem types are defined by studying biogeoclimatic gradients using an approach that is both modular (in which combinations of ecological factors are studied at a given scale) and hierarchical (involving relative spatial and temporal scales in which local/site gradients are dependent on bioclimatic/regional gradients). This avoids the problem of classes that are not mutually exclusive and enables the classification of all types of ecosystems, including for example marshes on rocky outcrops in superhumid tropical montane areas. Secondly, the names of ecosystem species are linked to a nomenclatural type defined by a ‘type site’ or ‘biotype’, adopting a principle that makes clear a given author's notion of an ecosystem type even if the accompanying name and description are partial or imperfect, or when the ecosystem type is delimited too broadly according to the interpretation of another author. Ecosystem names are structured as a descriptive diagnosis based on a standardized set of characters and character states. This typological approach for facilitating the naming and comparison of ecosystem circumscriptions is thus truly taxonomic in nature. Thirdly, in order to facilitate the use and application of the conceptual approach presented here, we translate it into a practical tool by developing a smartphone-based system to collect data for observing and describing virtual ecosystem specimens in the field, along with the "Bio" database, which manages ecosystem data and also enables tracking synonymies using an open system that entails assigning determinavits to biotypes.

在过去几年中，用于评估物种面临灭绝风险的 IUCN 红色名录方法已被改编为生态系统红色名录方法。这项工作面临几个重要挑战，包括如何定义适用红色名录标准的生态系统类型，以及如何以开放、透明和标准化的方式管理生态系统地理分布信息，将地图、类型学和实地研究。我们提出了一种全新的方法，该方法在三个重要方面与当前可用的生态系统类型不同：(1) 提供了一种概念化生态系统类型的新方法，(2) 提供了一种明确的方法来传达概念化的生态系统及其如何界定，(3) 开发用于管理由此产生的概念模型的技术工具。首先，生态系统类型是通过使用模块化（在给定尺度上研究生态因素的组合）和分层（涉及相对空间和时间尺度，其中局部/地点梯度取决于生物气候）的方法研究生物地理气候梯度来定义的。 /区域梯度）。这避免了不相互排斥的类别问题，并能够对所有类型的生态系统进行分类，包括例如超湿润热带山地地区岩石露头上的沼泽。其次，生态系统物种的名称与由“类型位点”或“生物型”定义的命名类型相关联，采用明确作者的原则” 生态系统类型的概念，即使随附的名称和描述不完整或不完整，或者根据另一位作者的解释对生态系统类型的界定过于宽泛。生态系统名称被构造为基于一组标准化字符和字符状态的描述性诊断。因此，这种促进生态系统范围命名和比较的类型学方法在本质上是真正的分类学。第三，为了促进这里介绍的概念方法的使用和应用，我们通过开发基于智能手机的系统来收集数据以在现场观察和描述虚拟生态系统标本，以及“生物“数据库，生物型的决定因素。