Lists (6)

boreal forest (conifers); temperate forest (hardwoods or mixed hardwoods and conifers); tropical forest; desert; the alpine zone; grassland; tundra; and chaparral, sometimes called shrubland

these are the principal Terran biomes

cities; villages; croplands; rangelands; forests; and wildlands

these are the principal Terran human-use patterns anthromes

mix and match the above, and you get the 825 eco-regions of Earth

450 on land, 229 marine

65 percent of these now exist only off-planet

take an x-y graph to chart a Whittaker biome diagram, with precipitation marked vertically and temperature horizontally. Biomes can be plotted on this graph and will make a clearly shaped map of what kind of biome turns up in what kind of conditions. Left is hotter, right colder; wet is higher, dry lower; and thus the most general version is as follows:


Tropical rain forest


Tropical seasonal forest

Temperate rain forest

Savanna

Temperate deciduous forest

Taiga

Subtropical desert

Temperate grassland

desert Tundra

The classifications can be much elaborated. The 450 named terrestrial eco-regions divide biomes by not only precipitation and temperature, but also combinations of latitude, altitude, geography, geology, and other factors

eco-regions themselves can be usefully divided into microenvironments as small as a hectare

34,850 known species went extinct between 1900 and 2100. It was, and remains ongoing, the sixth great mass extinction in Earth’s history

no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however)

19,340 terraria are known to exist in the solar system. Approximately 70 percent of these function as zoo worlds, either dedicated to sustaining an eco-region’s suite of animals and plants, or else to creating new combinations of suites, called Ascensions

92 percent of mammal species are now endangered or gone entirely from Earth and live mainly in their off-planet terraria

space: the zoo, the

inoculant

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