The Representativeness Concept

• Because the ecoregions are statistically derived, one can select a single ecoregion of particular interest, and then produce a sorted vector of the similarity of all other ecoregions to the selected one

• The chosen ecoregion establishes an origin in data space. Using the Euclidean distance from this origin to each other ecoregion, a pairwise similarity measure can be calculated

• Coding these pairwise similarity values as gray levels, a map can be drawn which cartographically shows the degree of similarity of all ecoregions in the map to the selected ecoregion of interest

• Darker areas are high in similarity to the selected ecoregion, which is shown in red.