What are biomas: types and examples

Biomes are each and every one of the Ecosystems sets that exist in a certain biographical zone of the planet. Coming from the Greek “bios” (life), biomes include the various species of living beings (animals, plants and microorganisms) that predominate in an area delimited by very specific climatic characteristics.

In this way, biomes present The climate factor and biodiversity factor as its main components. One of the main functions that biomes perform is to illustrate and present information about the biodiversity that characterizes each region of the planet, also determining how biodiversity is greater in those biomes located near Ecuador, while in the poles, the biodiversity of these biomes decreases.

On some occasions, biomes are called biotic areas or bioclimatic landscapes. However, the definition of what a bioma is sometimes confused with that of Habitat and ecozonea very common mistake.

To better strengthen the term of bioma, let’s see in the next sections the different types of biomes that exist in nature, as well as some examples of the most characteristic and surprising biomes.

If you want to know more about what the habitat is or the types of habitat that exist, do not hesitate to consult these other articles that we recommend.

We can differentiate the types of biomes from the world taking into account A series of factors that determine them. These factors are:

• The type of vegetation
• The level of precipitation and humidity
• Temperature gradients according to altitude and latitude
• The type of community structure
• The form of growth of its species

These factors are a fairly complex classification that throughout the history of ecology has been studied with the objective of establishing the most optimal and illustrative method to differentiate the biomes from the planet.

Among these classification methods, the System developed by Heinrich Walterbased on the seasonality of temperature and rainfall, and other climatic features such as humidity and cold conditions; In addition to the types of vegetation that define each of these 9 great resulting biomes:

• Equatorial Bioma: They are tropical and perennial rain forests.
• Tropical Bioma: They are seasonal forests with thickets or even savannas.
• Subtropical Bioma: It is composed of desert vegetation.
• Mediterranean bioma: We talk about thickets and forests adapted to droughts and frost sensitive.
• Warm temperate bioma: It is a temperate forest sensitive to frost and perennial.
• Nemoral Bioma: A tempered forest resistant to frost and deciduous.
• Continental Bioma: They are the temperate and grassland deserts.
• Boreal bioma: We talk about evergreen forests of acicular leaves and frost resistant.
• Polar bioma: Contains low bearing vegetation without trees on permanently frozen soils.

Other classification systems of biomes

We can also define what the types of biomas are, as established by the World Nature Fund (WWF)which identifies different types of main habitats in which it organizes the biomes, first, in two large subgroups:

• Terrestrial Biomes: In this subgroup we find all terrestrial and freshwater habitats.
• Aquatic or sailor biomes: Within them we can differentiate between biomes of coast and continental platform and the subgroup of open and deep sea biomes.

Each and every one of these types of biomes include different examples that receive one or another name according to their climatic characteristics and geographical area in which they are found. Let’s look at some of these examples of terrestrial and aquatic biomes.

Examples of terrestrial biomes

Within the terrestrial biomes, as we have mentioned above, we can find 8 different types of biomes, although sometimes a ninth bioma, that of mangroves. We are going to see them more in detail below.

• Coniferous temperate forest
• Xerophilic deserts and thickets
• Tempered steppes and thickets
• Praderas and flooded sheets
• Subtropical savannas
• Tropical jungles
• Tundras
• Taigas
• Mangroves

In this other ecology article, you can discover much more about the types of terrestrial biomes.

Examples of aquatic biomes

Now that we know what biomes are and that in the previous section we have been able to read that the aquatic or marine biomes are those that refer to the biomes between the coast and the open sea. In this way, some examples of aquatic biomes that we can find are the following.

• Sweet Biomes: We talk about the Corrientes de los Ríos waters, for example, or still waters such as lakes or lagoons.
• Marine biomes: Within this bioma we can meet the coastal or neritic marine biomes, characterized by the luminosity of its waters and the shallow depth, or the oceanic or pelagic marine biomes, which have areas where the light does not reach due to their depths. Some examples can be the oceanic islands, tropical corals or temperate marine platforms.

Now that you know what aquatic biomes are, do not hesitate to take a look at this video where the Characteristics of aquatic ecosystems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc4v4nhyt8y

If you want to read more articles similar to What are biomas: types and exampleswe recommend that you enter our category of ecosystems.