Article

This volume invites papers that connect floras, i.e. species, with concepts of vegetation, which may or may not be based directly on species. There is a long history of attempts to relate vegetation to climatic conditions, but only a very few attempts to relate species to climate. This study demonstrates how widely available floristic data can be used to evaluate non-floristic models that describe vegetation by means of its structure and constituent plant types, using the climatic limits of those types. Climatic envelopes have been criticized strongly as based only on “empirical” relationships, and the accuracy of the first world climatic-envelope model, for 90 plant types, was only “fair”. That first envelope model, however, was improved by adding better estimates of potential evapotranspiration and critical minimum temperatures, better representation of foliage types; and by increasing to 115 the number of plant types. That model, now much more accurate, still lacks a formal, global validation. This short paper demonstrates how such a worldwide validation might be done, where the necessary floristic and pheno-morphological data are available.