Biome Quantification

I recently put up an update about how biomes can be measured and determined numerically. Here's the original text.

Quote :

The key variables in the biome system are location, terrain, water, and succession.

Location depends on a couple of factors in itself, the main factor being latitude, which affects sunlight intensity, which in turn effects heat. Sunlight intensity and heat are both also controlled by atmospheric variables, which I have not yet written maths for, but the maths for them are fairly simple. Latitude also affects seasonality, which in turn plays back into light and heat.

Light will be measured by a sin function whose y values correspond to watts/m2 and x coordinates correspond to time (in years)


Terrain also is a factor in biomes. The overall shape of the terrain and the elevation help determine whether a biome can reside in a certain place.

Water is a very important variable. It determines the overall type of biome. There are three of these overall categories, which are aquatic, terrestrial, and intertidal. These names speak for themselves.
For terrestrial biomes, water will be measured in mm/year.
For intertidal biomes, water will be measured by salinity and tidal period.
For aquatic biomes, water will be measured by salinity, DO (dissolved oxygen) levels, and depth (which limits light determined by location)

Succession is measured in succession stages, which correspond to nutrient values. Succession stages, of which there will be 4 or 5, are measured in nutrients/m2 of ground area (this assumes that all of the area of soil underneath that square meter is usable and contains an even amount of nutrients per square meter)

I'll extrapolate on this here, and hopefully there will be a good amount of discussion to refine the concept.

Here are the fine details on the variables.

Location

Spoiler:

Now that we know the light intensity, we can predict the climate. I'm writing stuff for this as we speak, to translate light intensity into heat. Once I've done that, we'll have a seasonal curve.

We can then split the planet into areas of latitude with a certain seasonal curve. The next step is to determine the "water" factor in these areas, which will further subdivide these bands. After that, the terrain geometry will subdivide the latitudinal areas again.

We will have a list of biomes which contain value ranges for each of these variables. Therefore, once the planet is subdivided, we can assign each region to a certain biome!

Once biomes have been defined, they can be populated. Biomes are populated by autotrophs first. Because the process for populating autotrophs is quite lengthy, I'm creating a new thread for it.

I just threw up a little in my brain, scio.