We talk about climate zones because national borders are man-made. And since flora and fauna are demonstrably not bound to these in their growth and spread, we organise our research trips roughly according to the five main climate zones, which are distinguished from each other by similar geophysical conditions (e.g. amount of solar radiation, air temperature):
- Polar zone
- Subpolar zone
- Temperate zone
- Subtropics
- Tropics
However, this categorisation does not take into account climate factors such as precipitation and humidity. We therefore divide these internally into several vegetation zones and use the distribution of certain plants to draw conclusions about the long-term temperature and climate conditions in their growing areas, thus approximating the real conditions in the traditional primary production of plant foods.
- Polar zone
- Arctic
Antarctic
- Subpolar zone
- Tundra
- Taiga (Boreal coniferous forest)
- Temperate zone
- Temperate rainforest
- Mixed deciduous forests
- Steppes
- Subtropics
- Winter moist forests and shrublands
- Ever-moist laurel forests
- Hot desert vegetation
- Tropics
- Hot and humid rainforest
- Humid savannahs
- Dry savannahs and forests
- Thorn savannahs
To prevent the number of categories in our blog from getting out of hand, we only use the five climate zones and only refer to the respective vegetation zone in the blog entry.
By the way:
Arctic terns breed in the north polar region and spend the winter in the south polar regions. They cover an annual flight distance of around 30,000 kilometres.1)
So let us first turn our attention to the polar zone. This includes the permafrost regions and ice deserts and therefore does not have as extensive plant vegetation as other climate zones. However, these regions are certainly interesting for the production of animal foodstuffs.
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We will provide a very rough overview of the special features of the individual climate zones that are relevant to us in our next blog posts:
References:
1) Cf. Wikipedia, 2024: Küstenseeschwalbe, taken from the internet on 20.04.2024, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Küstenseeschwalbe