What is a biome, and what are the major biomes in North America?
Earth's Patchwork Quilt
What is a biome, and what are the major biomes in North America?
Picture Earth wearing a giant patchwork quilt. Each patch has its own weather, its own plants, its own crowd of animals — a sweltering green square here, a frozen white one there. Those patches have a name. We call them biomes, and North America is stitched together from several of the most dramatic ones on the planet.
So what exactly is a biome? It's a big region defined by two bossy ingredients: how warm it is, and how much rain it gets. Mix temperature and moisture in different amounts, and you bake different "recipes" of life. A biome isn't a single forest or one pond — it's the whole sprawling neighborhood where similar plants and animals keep showing up, again and again, because the climate keeps inviting them.
