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In ecology, a biome is a major regional group of distinctive plant and animalcommunities best adapted to the region's physical natural environment, latitude, altitude, and terrain. A biome is made up of communities at stable steady state and all associated transitional, disturbed, or degraded, vegetation, fauna and soils, but can often be identified by the climax vegetation type. A fundamental classification of biomes is into: Biomes are often given local names. For example, a Temperate grassland or shrubland biome is known commonly as steppe in central Asia, savanna or veld in southern Africa, prairie in North America, pampa in South America and outback or scrub in Australia. Sometimes an entire biome may be targeted for protection, especially under an individual nation's Biodiversity Action Plan.
Latitude classification Latitude is a major climate-influencing factor determining biomes. There is a good correlation between the distribution of climates with latitude, and homogeneous vegetation bands. Another major factor is humidity. This can be illustrated by the fact that biodiversity increases away from the poles towards the equator, and increases with humidity. The most widely used classification of biomes is related to latitude (or temperature zoning) and humidity Arctic or subarctic area Tundra Subarctic and boreal area Temperate cold Tropical Aquatic Altitude and latitude classification Another system of classification takes into account altitude and humidity, ignoring temperature as a factor. This classification is used to define the Global 200 list of ecoregions identified by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as priorities for conservation. This classification gives the following terrestrial biomes Other biomes The Endolithic biome, consisting entirely of microscopic life in rock pores and cracks, kilometers beneath the surface, has only recently been discovered and does not fit well into most classification schemes. See also | ||||||||
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