The World's Tapestries: A Narrative Review of Biomes, Ecoregions, and Biodiversity Hotspots, from Köppen's Climates to Half-Earth
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: The world's living cover is not continuous but patterned—biomes at the continental scale, ecoregions at the landscape's, and within them the biodiversity hotspots whose endemism and threat define conservation's priorities. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature that built that patterned view of the planet, from Köppen's 1936 climatic system, which gave the biomes their climatic grid, through Holdridge's 1947 life zones, which derived formations from temperature and precipitation, Whittaker's 1975 Communities and Ecosystems, which organized the biome concept ecologically, Udvardy's 1975 biogeographical provinces for the IUCN, Bailey's 1983 ecosystem regions, Myers's 1988 hotspots proposal for threatened tropical forests, Myers and colleagues' 2000 Nature hotspots synthesis, which fixed the priority map, Olson and colleagues' 2001 terrestrial ecoregions of the world, the map conservation adopted, Ricketts and colleagues' 2005 pinpointing of imminent extinctions, Mittermeier and colleagues' 2011 critical assessment of the hotspot role, Dinerstein and colleagues' 2017 ecoregion-based protection of half the terrestrial realm, and Sayre and colleagues' 2020 new global maps of climate regions and ecosystems. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the climatic scaffolding, in which classification systems—Köppen's, Holdridge's, Whittaker's—gave the biomes their determinants; the regionalization, in which provinces and ecoregions converted the biomes into mapped units of management; and the conservation turn, in which hotspots and protection targets made the map normative. It is concluded that the three literatures are one cartographic project—from climate's grid to the priority map—and that the modern targets, ecoregions represented and hotspots secured, are the project's current chapters.
Authors: Revista, Zen, GEOGRAPHY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204667604