About

What this site is

Unique Nature Habitats is an independent magazine about the world’s biomes, written around a single question: where does one habitat stop, and what decides the position of that line?

The answer is almost never the thing people expect. A treeline is set by summer soil warmth rather than winter cold. A desert is a rainfall figure, which is how the largest one on the planet came to be frozen. Savannah is held open by fire and grazing, and stops being savannah within decades of their removal. Each of the four sections takes one part of that: the boundaries themselves, habitat built by the organisms living in it, definitions that surprise people, and the field methods that put any of it on a map.

How the guides are written

Each guide states its measurements. Where a figure comes from a named study or a named researcher it says so, and where the number is a rule of thumb it says that too. Guides link to each other where the material overlaps, because most of these boundaries share a small number of controlling variables.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, or out of date, we want to know. Write to us through the contact page and quote the guide and the paragraph.