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The Mediterranean Biogeographic Region is the biogeographic region around and including the Mediterranean Sea. The term is defined by the European Environment Agency as applying to the land areas of Europe that border on the Mediterranean Sea, and the corresponding territorial waters. The region is rich in biodiversity and has many endemic species.
The European Environmental Agency (EEA) divides Europe into a total of eleven terrestrial biogeographical regions and seven regional seas. [1] The agency has issued the Digital Map of European Ecological Regions (DMEER), and operates with a total of 70 ecoregions, of which 58 are within the European continent .
The original Habitats Directive of 21 May 1992 identified five biogeographical regions: Alpine, Atlantic, Continental, Macaronesian and Mediterranean. These provide a geographical framework for creating a draft list of Sites of Community Importance from the lists provided by the member states. [ 6 ]
Biogeographic realms correspond to the floristic kingdoms of botany or zoogeographic regions of zoology. From 1872, Alfred Russel Wallace developed a system of zoogeographic regions, extending the ornithologist Philip Sclater's system of six regions. [1] Biogeographic realms are characterized by the evolutionary history of the organisms they ...
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.
This page features a list of biogeographic provinces that were developed by Miklos Udvardy in 1975, [1] [2] later modified by other authors. [according to whom?] Biogeographic Province is a biotic subdivision of biogeographic realms subdivided into ecoregions, which are classified based on their biomes or habitat types and, on this page, correspond to the floristic kingdoms of botany.
The Mediterranean basin is also one of the world's most endangered biogeographic regions; only 4% of the region's original vegetation remains, and human activities, including overgrazing, deforestation, and conversion of lands for pasture, agriculture, and urbanization, have degraded much of the region.
Even within the Mediterranean Basin, differences in aridity alter the life zones as a function of elevation. For example, the wetter Maritime and Dinaric Alps have a North-Mediterranean zonation pattern, while the southern Apennine Mountains and the Spanish Sierra Nevada have a moderate Eu-Mediterranean zonation pattern.