We introduce a globally consistent, dynamic approach to ecological zoning, representing broad, homogeneous natural-vegetation formations via the Holdridge life zones. Our scheme directly addresses some of the shortcomings in the existing guidance provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on SpringerLink
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
References
Holdridge, L. R. Life Zone Ecology (Tropical Science Center, 1967). This book introduces the updated ‘life zone’ concept, which is used as one of the main ecological zoning approaches and serves as the basis for our study.
Harris, I., Osborn, T. J., Jones, P. & Lister, D. Version 4 of the CRU TS monthly high resolution gridded multivariate climate dataset. Sci. Data 7, 109 (2020). This paper describes the climatic dataset that we used in our work.
Tadono, T. et al. Precise Global DEM generation by ALOS PRISM. ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spat. Inf. Sci. II-4, 71–76 (2014). This paper describes the global digital elevation model that we used as the elevation dataset in our work.
Eggleston, S., Buendia, L., Miwa, K., Ngara, T. & Tanabe, K. (eds) 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, 2006). This IPCC report provides guidance for countries compiling national greenhouse gas inventories, which include default ‘factors’.
Allen, R. G., Pereira, L. S., Raes, D. & Smith, M. Crop Evapotranspiration: Guidelines for Computing Crop Water Requirements (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1988). This paper presents an updated procedure for calculating reference evapotranspiration from meteorological data and crop coefficients.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This is a summary of: Audebert, P. et al. Ecological zoning for climate policy and global change studies. Nat. Sustain. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01416-5 (2024).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
A new approach to ecological zoning of the Earth in a changing climate. Nat Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01419-2
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01419-2
