Consider relationship between ENVO:00000428 and traditionally defined bioime

[baskaufs]

Modified from discussion at http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2015-May/003540.html

I'm not sure that I would necessarily have gotten a clear picture of what ENVO wants "biome" to mean solely from the documentation. The .obo file includes "Wikipedia:Biome" as a citation for the ENVO definition, but the Wikipedia definition of bioime [1] doesn't really seem to bear any resemblence to the ENVO definition. The ENVO term description also includes "synonym: 'major habitat type' EXACT [WWF:Biome]", but WWF [2] doesn't define biomes as ENVO does either. Both Wikipedia and WWF talk about biomes in the traditional sense of large geographic regions. If the ENVO definition of biome is intended to broaden biome beyond its traditional meaning, then I think it would be better to give the ENVO:00000428 some different label ("evolved environmental system"?) and reserve the label "biome" for biome in the traditional sense (with the declared WWF and Wikipedia equivalencies). Then declare "biome" rdfs:subClassOf "evolved environmental system".

Also, if the various ENVO subclasses of ENVO:00000428 are intended to be equivalent to all or part of WWF biomes, then why not note this in the term description? Unlike Wikipedia, which could change tomorrow, the WWF bioimes are well-described in stable publications such as Ricketts et al. (1999) [3].

Please note that subsequent posts in this thread raised questions about the "evolved" part of the definition.

[1] "Biomes are climatically and geographically defined as contiguous areas with similar climatic conditions on the Earth, such as communities of plants, animals, soil organisms, and viruses and are often referred to as ecosystems. Some parts of the earth have more or less the same kind of abiotic and biotic factors spread over a large area, creating a typical ecosystem over that area. Such major ecosystems are termed as biomes. Biomes are defined by factors such as plant structures (such as trees, shrubs, and grasses), leaf types (such as broadleaf and needleleaf), plant spacing (forest, woodland, savanna), and climate. "

[2] "Biomes are the various regions of our planet that can best be distinguished by their climate, fauna and flora. There are different ways of classifying biomes but the common elements are climate, habitat, animal and plant adaptation, biodiversity and human activity."
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/teacher_resources/webfieldtrips/major_biomes/

[3] http://islandpress.org/terrestrial-ecoregions-north-america