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The life zone concept was developed by C. Hart Merriam in 1889 as a means of describing areas with similar plant and animal communities. Merriam observed that the changes in these communities with an increase in latitude at a constant elevation are similar to the changes seen with an increase in elevation at a constant latitude.
The habitable zone is also called the Goldilocks zone, a metaphor, allusion and antonomasia of the children's fairy tale of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", in which a little girl chooses from sets of three items, rejecting the ones that are too extreme (large or small, hot or cold, etc.), and settling on the one in the middle, which is "just ...
The climate and ecology of different locations on the globe naturally separate into life zones, depending on elevation, location, and latitude.The generally strong dependency on elevation is known as altitudinal zonation: the average temperature of a location decreases as the elevation increases.
Every part of the planet, from the polar ice caps to the equator, features life of some kind. Recent advances in microbiology have demonstrated that microbes live deep beneath the Earth's terrestrial surface and that the total mass of microbial life in so-called "uninhabitable zones" may, in biomass, exceed all animal and plant life on the ...
A Habitable Zone for Complex Life (HZCL) is a range of distances from a star suitable for complex aerobic life. Different types of limitations preventing complex life give rise to different zones. [1] Conventional habitable zones are based on compatibility with water. [2]
The terrestrial example suggests that complex life requires liquid water, the maintenance of which requires an orbital distance neither too close nor too far from the central star, another scale of habitable zone or Goldilocks principle. [15] The habitable zone varies with the star's type and age.
The terrestrial scheme divides the Earth's land surface into 8 biogeographic realms, containing 867 smaller ecoregions. Each ecoregion is classified into one of 14 major habitat types , or biomes . In 2017 the WWF team revised ecosystem names and boundaries in the Arabian Peninsula, drier African regions, and Southeastern United States.
Biogeographic realms are characterized by the evolutionary history of the organisms they contain. They are distinct from biomes, also known as major habitat types, which are divisions of the Earth's surface based on life form, or the adaptation of animals, fungi, micro-organisms and plants to climatic, soil, and other conditions