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pcdb - [pcdb] Categorizing Setting Using Nested Hierarchical Taxonomies

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Subject: Permaculture Database

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  • From: Paul Cereghino <paul.cereghino@comcast.net>
  • To: pcdb <pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [pcdb] Categorizing Setting Using Nested Hierarchical Taxonomies
  • Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 21:28:00 -0700


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.






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