Fire regimes: moving from a fuzzy concept to geographic entity

Understanding ecological processes at a global scale relies on the use of interrelated biogeographic concepts such as the 'biome', 'vegetation type' and 'climate zone'. The familiarity of these concepts amongst ecologists and biogeographers probably masks their inherent complexity and the difficulty in arriving at workable and agreed definitions. These classical concepts have become refined and operationalized over the last 200 yr, and they can now be broadly reproduced by process-based dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) based on a small array of plant functional types.