What’s a Biome?
Here we see two different biomes—deserts on the left and grasslands on the right. But both are land environments. Images by Bob Protus and Bkell.
To make sense of complexity, humans often need to categorize, or group, things. We have food groups, sexes, eye colors, ages, and movie genres, to name a few. We categorize all types of things, whether they are ideas or objects, and whether they are small or large. One of the largest things that we try to categorize may be the types of environments found on Earth.
The natural world is more varied than we can imagine, and one way to try to make this variation easier to handle is to put different environment types into groups. We can divide our surroundings many ways—by how much water there is, by how warm it is, or by the types of plants or animals we find there. Depending on what characteristics we choose to describe an environment, the groupings we end up selecting may be different.
A biome is a type of environment that is defined by the types of organisms that live there. We can also think of these as life zones (“bio” means life). Dividing land up in this way lets us talk about areas that are similar, even if they’re on different continents. But depending on whom you talk to, the way we divide up the world into separate biomes differs.
Biome vs. Biome
Biome categories can be broad or narrow. When we say forest, you may picture a cool, quiet area with pine trees, where bears, deer, and rabbits wander around. Or instead, you might imagine a wet, dark, and noisy rainforest, where you can big cats and parrots.
Biomes of the World
In order to give you a small taste of the huge diversity of the types of environments out there, we divide the world up into only nine biomes. Just remember that these groups could also be divided into nearly 20 biomes. That means that within each of these biomes there is a range of temperature and weather conditions, and we also find some organisms that are adapted to only part of the biome and others that are adapted to the full range of conditions within the boundaries we are defining.
There are eight major terrestrial biomes: tropical rainforests, savannas, subtropical deserts, chaparral, temperate grasslands, temperate forests, boreal forests, and Arctic tundra.
* source – https://askabiologist.asu.edu
