Permaculture Database

[Paul Cereghino <paul.cereghino@comcast.net>]

> To be honest, I have no idea how to resolve the dimensions introduced by
> adding site-specific info. It may make things too complicated...
I think Jedd asked what the f#!* I meant by hierarchical taxonomy.  This 
is where I think it plugs in:

The variation in the environment is an infinite combination of variables 
at multiple scales combined with infinite combination of storylines.  
That is the mystery of life.  To organize thinking we must divide the 
one into the many.  We want to retain that there is the one/whole/united 
reality, but we can't teach the whole and we can't talk about the whole, 
and we cant write the whole down in our little books (except perhaps 
through art).

So we divide the whole into categories.  But how do we do it.  How do we 
chop it up?!  Where do we find the seam between the shoulder and the 
arm?!  You wiggle it, move it, and feel for the seams into which we slip 
the knife.

The setting of permaculture is a whole globe.  But strategy changes with 
setting.  The critical pathway of relationship changes with setting.  I 
am born and raised and soaked in the north American pacific rain 
forest.  My whole plant/soil world view is biased by that parentage.

Two factors divide the globe... temperature regime and precipitation.

Boreal, Temperate, Sub-tropical, Tropical
Wet, Moist, Semi-arid, Arid... and these vary systematically to produce 
the world ecoregions.
Most people identify around 12-14 major terrestrial habitats... here's 
an example
http://sites-conserveonline.org/gpg/projects/tnc2015goal.html

If you start looking at biodiversity patterns it gets a little more tangled.
Another level of mapping identifies 867 world ecoregions... I live in 
NAO524 and I dont know a goddamn thing about Carpentaria Tropical 
Savannah (AA0704)
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/wildworld/terrestrial.html

These two spatial datasets are relatively nested..they both consider 
vegetation physiognomy as an identifiable symptom of climate.

so you have a nested hierarchical taxonomy:  whole planet -- 13 major 
terrestrial habitats -- 867 world ecoregions

Locally we often lump the Willamette valley, Puget Lowland, and Central 
pacific coastal forest into a "Pacific Northwest Lowlands"  This is a 
user generated regional group, perhaps quite appropriate for many 
aspects of design.  Some information may apply to all temperate conifer 
forest, some knowledge may be particular to NAO524.

These are SETTING attributes.