Talk:Altitudinal zonation

Needs attention from expert
This article needs some attention from a real ecologist. As I understand it, altitudinal zonation is an specific ecological concept that describes how a species is limited to specific altitudes. I'm not 100% sure of this, however, so I am reluctant to edit the article myself. There are some other closely articles: life zones talk about altitude-specific biotic zones with multiple interrelated species, and climate zones by altitude may discuss climate variation with altitude.

Both this article and climate zones by altitude are disorganized lists of climate/life zones as a function of geography. A better-organized list article would be useful, but probably should not be here. —hike395 (talk) 21:24, 13 February 2010 (UTC)


 * This article is just life's basic knowledge South of Germany, North of Italy, Switzerland and Austria. There is no pure white or pure black, just a lot of grays. There is a knowledge interface between Climate change by altitude, Vegetation change by climate, and Ecoregion change by climate. I tried to expand this article based on Höhenstufen (de:Höhenstufe (Ökologie)). Climate zones by altitude and Natural regions of Peru are used as section expansion, too. Life zones and Biomes seem to be basic concepts. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 08:01, 14 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm thinking that this article, Climate zones by altitude, and Natural regions of Peru should be combined into a single List of climate zones by altitude. WP would not lose the information, and we could restart this article around the basic concept. —hike395 (talk) 06:51, 15 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Well. Altitudinal zonation was a stub if I remember it right. If you want to explain something, you need images and examples. Examples are self-explaining. Just one list-file would get very big, more than 32 kBytes. A mountain pass is a climate border, a vegetation border and sometimes an ecoregion border. I tried to demonstrate this clockwork. You can not "see" the Alpin vegetation variation and the Andean vegetation variation without examples. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 07:12, 15 February 2010 (UTC)


 * After going through and fixing the citations on this article, I think that the first third of the article (before the examples) is pretty good. After that, the article degrades into poorly-formatted material that would be hard for people to understand and does not illustrate the point of the article very well.


 * Here's what I would like to do: for this article, I would like to have either one clearly explained example from one location on the globe, or perhaps a table that combines several examples. I'm happy to write/rewrite the example. I would take all of the miscellaneous examples from here and Climate zones by altitude and split them into separate articles, one per geographic location (e.g., Mediterranean, African, etc.). Those would be similar to Natural regions of Peru, except several of them. Right now, the articles taken together are just a complete mess: they are very low quality and are not helping our readers. —hike395 (talk) 05:15, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't agree w the complete mess. But u have more experience than I, n u see where do u want to go. The honours r urs ;) --Chris.urs-o (talk) 05:46, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Merge with life zone
I'm strongly opposed to this, since life zones include not merely altitudinal, but also latitudinal and other temperature-based (or more specifically, biotemperature-based) zonation. In addition, of course, there's the entirely separate moisture axis (or P/PET ratio) which is entirely orthogonal to altitude (except insofar as orographic effects can affect rainfall, and PET is a function of temperature).

So clearly, no. Guettarda (talk) 06:28, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Could you then expand Life zone to encompass those concepts? The current article is only about altitude zones —hike395 (talk) 06:48, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

That current article is stubby and does not add anything to WP beyond either this article or Holridge life zone. That seems like a problem to me. How do you suggest fixing it? Deletion? —hike395 (talk) 06:53, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Title of article
C. Körner (logged in as an IP editor) has changed the text of the article to say "elevational zonation" instead of "altitudinal zonation". The title and the body of the article should be largely consistent (see WP:ALTNAME for more information). Here is an analysis of the usage of these terms:


 * Google Scholar
 * Altitudinal zonation: 6130 articles
 * Elevational zonation: 887 articles


 * Google n-grams (occurance in books)
 * n-grams link shows Altitudinal zonation usage is approximately 20 times more common than elevational zonation.

Therefore, I will change elevational zonation back to altitudinal zonation throughout the text. —hike395 (talk) 19:10, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Later, the point (that "elevation" is more correct than "altitude") raised by C. Körner is correct, so I replaced all occurrences of the latter with the former, only keeping the title consistent. —hike395 (talk) 19:39, 29 September 2018 (UTC)