Biome Establishment and the rule of 100m/322km

All right - I've been making tables of the biomes we have so far, and while I plan to add to those, I think I've figured out what is most important in determining which biomes go where.

1) Temperature is relative to elevation and latitude. As a general rule of thumb, you get similar biomes for every 100 meters you ascend in elevation as you would have another 322km away from the equator. (before anyone starts whining about sideways planets, the definition of equator we are running with here is "point of most intense solar radiation," and I will be referring to it as "equator" to save my belgium from ever typing that again.) Not only is this a belgiumming convenient rule, but it's in metric too.

2) Precipitation is the next big hoopla. At least on land. Water=life. Where you don't have it, you have different kinds of life that really want that water. Every single drop of water counts.

3) Sucession Stages: We all agreed that the "biodiversity" measurement was bunk. It is now a place to describe further the types of things that are in your biome. We are now using Sucession Stages, on which yours truly has more information than she can throw a textbook at, to qualify what type a biome is. I'll be classifying them, with interference from scio and anyone else who appears to know what this is, for now, so all you need to know is that
a) one biome can either grow into another or be disturbed in some way and change back.
b) stages of secession are as follows
- 0 (during or immediately after the disturbance)= pretty much no autorophs.
- 1 = stuff starts to grow. The percentage of ground covered by autotrophs is pretty darn small.
- 2 = most of the ground is covered by prolific, if uninventive, autotrophs. Most of them are some sort of grass equivalent. Basically, they prevent the ground from going anywhere.
- 3 = highest biodiversity, highest biomass. You have your tree equivalents (high-biomass vertical plants, and yes, there will often be something along those lines, giant ferns or whatever) and they provide shade. Groundcover has decreased, though the soil, as a rule, gets more fertile because it has more decomposing plant in it.
c) There is a potential to reach a super-state of stage 3, called a climax community, in which the biodiversity is at it's highest possible state, but that requires the biome to be undisturbed for a long time. Comments about implementation would be good.

Edit: Maths for adjusting by planet size and atmosphere density. Don't do it yet - we'll just apply these later when we have all of our biomes relative to one another.

Spoiler:

This post reserved for me dumping a table of biomes and their relative elevations/latitudes on you. It may not happen today or even soon, but it will happen. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Tree line - Elevation across, distance from equator down.

	3,000 m	2,800 m	2,600 m	2,400 m	2,200 m	2,000 m	1,800 m	1,600 m	1,400 m	1,200 m	1,000 m
0 km	Here
644 km		Here
1,288 km			Here
1,932 km				Here
2,576 km					Here
3,220 km						Here
3,864 km							Here
4,508 km								Here
5,152 km									Here
5,796 km										Here
6,440km											Here

This is assuming that winds and water are conducive to trees or your tree equivalent.

Highly Arid Biomes

Spoiler:

I'll probably play around with the formatting here, and end up classifying microbiomes by their sucession stage as well. Then, we will do resource tags and niches. But let me know how you like the bare bones - and that means programmers as well.

Death to Tables!

You've overlooked some maths, but it's only a bit of ellipse work. See, this rule applies for earth, which is 40,075.16 kilometers in circumference. For a larger planet, because its curvature is broader, the 322 km would be greater, although I believe with any livable-atmosphere planet, the elevation rule would say the same.

The maths will also be relative to atmospheric density. However, given that those are base manipulations, I assumed that they would chain to scale up, down and whatever anything that was applied to the world after them appropriately. (Though that will be a belgium of a lot of implications for us to look at...) Anyhow, in the interest of getting these compiled smoothly, I chose not to deal with them. We can batch manipulate them when we have a batch.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

The maths will also be relative to atmospheric density. However, given that those are base manipulations, I assumed that they would chain to scale up, down and whatever anything that was applied to the world after them appropriately. (Though that will be a belgium of a lot of implications for us to look at...) Anyhow, in the interest of getting these compiled smoothly, I chose not to deal with them. We can batch manipulate them when we have a batch.

I can do some simple tangent work to figure out how the intensity will change with the angle the light strikes the earth. Actually, I don't need to do much at all, it's pretty simple.

For every 2 .22 degree arc away from the equator, the temperature drops the same amount as it would @100m above the original point. Furthermore, for each 2.2 degrees or 100 meters you move, the temperature (on earth) decreases about .66 kelvin.

Therefore, 2.2° arc length away from the equator or an increase in elevation of 100 m yields a .66°C drop in temperature.

However, this model does not accurately represent earth average temperatures, which vary by more than 40 degrees. This model predicts a 27°C change. This may be due to earth's tilt, but I will investigate further, because the relationship may be exponential and not linear, as the model above shows.

Up posting. We can use this as an adjustor later.

I'm working on a set of three equations that will determine global temperature and seasonal variance, including the one for specific geographic climate that i just set up, for planets in the goldilocks zone with an atmosphere similar to earth's.
These equations cover:
Tilt
Rotation speed
distanc from equator & height.

These equations are scalable for just about any size body.

Tree line set and belgiumming adjusted - the maths will have to be done elsewhere.
Scio, can we please not go all NOAH and try to do winds and temperature fronts? I don't think that the game could handle it...

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Tree line set and belgiumming adjusted - the maths will have to be done elsewhere.
Scio, can we please not go all NOAH and try to do winds and temperature fronts? I don't think that the game could handle it...

Of course we aren't doing that. And it's NOAA.

Put up the bare bones for Highly Arid biomes. Check post 2. This would be a great time for feedback.

[Necropost is necro. Deal with it.]

What does the "here" mean? Is that effectively where a single biome could exist?

roadkillguy wrote:

What does the "here" mean? Is that effectively where a single biome could exist?

It's the tree line, so I assume it's where trees can exist, but some small biomes can exist without trees. So... Sort of?

Ah. Tree line is the altitude above which trees cannot exist. The "here" is the box where the tree line is, but only for exactly the altitude it says in the box... it makes more sense as a graph, trust me.