What are biomes?

What are biomes? 
Biomes are regions of the world with similar climate (weather, temperature) animals and plants. There are terrestrial biomes (land) and aquatic biomes, both freshwater and marine.

Would you like to know what the weather is like in different biomes around the world? How about the types of plants and animals that live in these biomes? Here you will find all sorts of information about the world's biomes.

How many biomes are there? 
There is really no completely right answer to this question. Some people say there are only 5 major types of biomes: aquatic, desert, forest, grassland, and tundra. Others split biomes further. Forests are separated into rainforest, temperate forest, chaparral, and taiga; grasslands are divided into savanna and temperate grasslands; and the aquatic biome is split into freshwater and marine.

Biotic Factors

An ecosystem is a community of organisms that interact with each other and with the abiotic and biotic factors in their environment. Abiotic factors are chemical and physical factors such as temperature, soil composition, and climate, along with the amount of sunlight, salinity, and pH. Biotic means living, and biotic factors are the other, living parts of the ecosystem with which an organism must interact. The biotic factors with which an organism interacts depend on whether it is a producer, a consumer, or a decomposer.

Producers are also known as autotrophs , or self-feeders. Producers manufacture the organic compounds that they use as sources of energy and nutrients. Most producers are green plants or algae that make organic compounds through photosynthesis . This process begins when sunlight is absorbed by chlorophyll and other pigments in the plant. The plants use energy from sunlight to combine carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with water from the soil to make carbohydrates, starches, and cellulose. This process converts the energy of sunlight into energy stored in chemical bonds with oxygen as a by-product. This stored energy is the direct or indirect source of energy for all organisms in the ecosystem.

The Indomalaya ecozone is one of the eight ecozones that cover the planet's land surface. It extends across most of South and Southeast Asia and into the southern parts of East Asia.

The Indomalaya Ecozone

Also called the Oriental Realm by biogeographers, Indomalaya extends from Afghanistan through the Indian subcontinentand Southeast Asia to lowland southern China, and through Indonesia as far as Java, Bali, and Borneo, east of which lies the Wallace line, the ecozone boundary named after Alfred Russel Wallace which separates Indomalaya from Australasia. Indomalaya also includes the Philippines, lowland Taiwan, and Japan's Ryukyu Islands.

Most of Indomalaya was originally covered by forest, mostly tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, with tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests predominant in much of India and parts of Southeast Asia. The tropical moist forests of Indomalaya are dominated by trees of the dipterocarp family (Dipterocarpace

Two orders of mammals, the colugos (Dermoptera) and treeshrews (Scandentia), are endemic to the ecozone, as are families Craseonycteridae (Kitti's Hog-nosed Bat), Diatomyidae,Platacanthomyidae, Tarsiidae (tarsiers) and Hylobatidae (gibbons). Large mammals characteristic of Indomalaya include the leopard, tigers, water buffalos, Asian Elephant, Indian Rhinoceros, Javan Rhinoceros, Malayan Tapir, orangutans, and gibbons.

Indomalaya has three endemic bird families, the Irenidae (leafbirds and fairy bluebirds), Megalaimidae and Rhabdornithidae (Philippine creepers). Also characteristic are pheasants, pittas, Old World babblers, and flowerpeckers.