Macroclimate and Plant Forms

1. Introduction.- 2. Modeling ecological structure and function.- A. World vegetation models in general.- B. The current model.- C. Model structure and technical considerations.- 3. Ecological classification of world vegetation.- A. Vegetation description and vegetation data.- B. Ecophysiognomic characters of terrestrial vegetation.- C. Life forms of world terrestrial vegetation.- 4. Modeling the effective environment.- A. Climate data.- B. Selection of ecoclimatic variables.- C. The ecoclimatic variables and their significance.- 5. The ecological model: life-form limitation, cover and dominance.- A. Ecological data.- B. The environmental-limitation model.- C. The cover model.- D. The dominance model.- E. Proximity to environmental limits.- F. Interpreting vegetation formations.- 6. Model results.- A. Model output and applicability.- B. Generating and mapping world results.- C. Overview of world ecoclimates.- D. Life-form prediction frequency.- E. Predicted plant-form distributions.- F. Predicting world vegetation types.- G. Physiognomic diversity of vegetation.- H. General observations and problems.- 7. Evaluation of model results.- A. Site comparison of predicted and actual vegetation.- B. Vegetation and climate at unusual sites.- C. Vegetation sensitivity to climatic variation.- 8. Conclusions and next steps.- Appendices.- Appendix A. Description of the plant types.- Appendix B. Predicted vegetation at selected representative and well-known sites.- Appendix C. Predicted vegetation at the validation sites.- Appendix D. Actual vegetation at the validation sites.- Appendix E. The macroclimatic data-base.- Appendix F. The processing and mapping programs.- References.