The Main Points

• Centuries of exploration resulted in extensive collections of plants and animals that were housed in the great musuems of the world

• As naturalists sorted the plantsspecimans, gave them names and fixed the collection sites on the first crude maps, vegetation patterns emerged that indicated the earth was a very "patchy" place. The great "patches" of vegetation were called formations. Here's a NASA map showing Vegetation Patterns of the planet. It shows quite nicely the "patchiness" of the world's vegetation. Also, go to the World Biome Web Site for pictures of the vegetation associated with these biomes. (Unless you have a very fast modem at home, I'd access this site at school). Some of the biomes are better represented than others, but there are useful images to see. In particular, notice how much "local" variation there is in the vegetation in all of the pictures.

  (There are many useful maps and images in the GLOBE Visualization Home Page that you can browse at your leisure).

• Two kinds of questions ermerged about these formations:
  1. What are these formations like, and
  2. Why are they there?

• We will spend the next couple of weeks exploring these questions, but at this point it can be said that the botanists discovered, early-on, that the "boundries" between the "formations" were very fuzzy - not like lines on the maps.

• Work by C.H. Merriam in 1894 on the mountains near Flagstaff, AZ, suggested that altitudinal "life zones" he described on the mountains had latitudinal correlates that corresponded roughly with "formations." He suggested that temperature patterns in these zones were the main causal factors for the kinds of vegetation that he saw. You will read about this in Chapter 8. Study Fig 8-15 and the accompanying text.