Forests, Taiga, and Tundra

Mediterranean woodland and scrub biomes occur in five widely separated regions of the world that share a distinctive climate of mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers: the Mediterranean Basin itself, California, central Chile, the Cape region of South Africa, and southwestern and southern Australia. Despite their geographic separation, these regions have converged on strikingly similar vegetation dominated by drought- and fire-adapted evergreen shrubs with small, tough, waxy leaves, a phenomenon botanists call convergent evolution. Regional names reflect this parallel development: chaparral in California, characterized by shrubs such as manzanita and chamise; maquis in the Mediterranean Basin proper, dominated by species like myrtle and mastic; fynbos in South Africa's Cape Floristic Region, an extraordinarily species-rich shrubland containing thousands of endemic plants including many proteas; and matorral in Chile, with an assemblage of sclerophyllous shrubs adapted to that country's dry summer. Fire is not merely tolerated but ecologically essential in most of these systems, with many species requiring heat or smoke exposure to trigger seed germination.