M. Daud Rafiqpoor – författare

This book provides a quantitative fully reproducible delineation of ecoclimatic boundaries to ecoclimate classification. In contrast to previous classifications, the ecoclimate classification does not use the usual “climatological averages,” i.e., the average values of temperature and precipitation and not their indices, but the climatic parameters relevant to plant life (i.e., the length of thermal and hygric growing seasons) as ecophysiologically meaningful variables, as criteria for the delimitation of climate types, as an answer to many environmental questions and also to the global climate change debate. However, the ecoclimate classification model presented here has the potential to infer changes in vegetation cover from changes in climate and vice versa. It is in this context that the ecoclimate classification is a powerful tool for assessing the dimensions of habitat change for flora and fauna or, conversely, for inferring the shift of ecoclimatic boundaries from changes in vegetation cover caused by climate change.

Vegetation, Boden und Klima sind die wichtigsten Komponenten ökologischer Systeme. Das Buch stellt eine kompakte Synthese unseres aktuellen Wissens dar über die Ökologie der Erde und ist damit die Basis für das Verständnis der großen Zusammenhänge in globaler Sicht. Das gut eingeführte Buch behandelt im ersten Teil mit einer reichen Ausstattung an Abbildungen und Fotomaterial die wesentlichen Prozesse und Vorgänge auf der Erdoberfläche, die zur Ausbildung der Vegetationsdecke mit ihrer ausgeprägten Zonierung führen. Im zweiten Teil werden die einzelnen Vegetationszonen als Großökosysteme (d.h. Zonobiome der Biosphäre) konsequent nach bestimmten Kriterien vergleichend beschrieben. In kurzer und kompakter Form wird auf die wesentlichen Kennzeichen und Strukturen sowie auf Beispiele für Ökosystemprozesse eingegangen. Die Großökosysteme sind zugleich auch Grundlage und Bezugssystem für alle anthropogenen Veränderungen, die in den letzten Jahrtausenden, vor allem aber im 20. Jhdt., die Vegetation drastisch verändert haben..

Vegetation, soil and climate are the most important components of ecological systems. The book represents a compact synthesis of our current knowledge about the ecology of the Earth and is thus the basis for understanding the major interrelationships in a global perspective. In the first part, with a rich endowment of illustrations and photographic material, the well-introduced book deals with the essential processes and operations on the Earth's surface that lead to the formation of the vegetation cover with its distinctive zonation. In the second part, the individual vegetation zones as large-scale ecosystems (i.e. zonobiomes of the biosphere) are consistently described comparatively according to certain criteria. In a short and compact form, the main characteristics and structures as well as examples of ecosystem processes are discussed. The large-scale ecosystems are at the same time the basis and reference system for all anthropogenic changes that have drastically altered thevegetation in the last millennia, but especially in the 20th century.This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Vegetation und Klima by Siegmar-W. Breckle and M. Daud Rafiqpoor, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.