The World’s Ecoclimates : A New Digital Climate Classification and Its Importance for Modelling Future Climate Change

This book provides a quantitative fully reproducible delineation of ecoclimatic boundaries to ecoclimate classification. In contrast to previous classifications, the ecoclimate classification does not use the usual “climatological averages,” i.e., the average values of temperature and precipitation and not their indices, but the climatic parameters relevant to plant life (i.e., the length of thermal and hygric growing seasons) as ecophysiologically meaningful variables, as criteria for the delimitation of climate types, as an answer to many environmental questions and also to the global climate change debate. However, the ecoclimate classification model presented here has the potential to infer changes in vegetation cover from changes in climate and vice versa. It is in this context that the ecoclimate classification is a powerful tool for assessing the dimensions of habitat change for flora and fauna or, conversely, for inferring the shift of ecoclimatic boundaries from changes in vegetation cover caused by climate change.