FAO Global Ecological Zones 

Parameter 

FAO Global Ecological Zones 


Represented classes

Tropical rain forest TAr 

Tropical moist deciduous forest TAwa 

Tropical dry forest TAwb 

Tropical shrubland TBSh 

Tropical desert TBWh 

Tropical mountain systems TM 

Subtropical humid forest 

Subtropical dry forest SCs 

Subtropical steppe SBSh 

Subtropical desert SBWh 

Subtropical mountain systems SM 

Temperate oceanic forest TeDo 

Temperate continental forest TeDc 

Temperate steppe TeBSk 

Temperate desert TeBWk 

Temperate mountain systems TeM 

Boreal coniferous forest Ba 

Boreal tundra woodland Bb 

Boreal mountain systems BM 

Polar P 


Description 

The Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) presents global and regional forest data by global ecological zone (GEZ). The GEZ spatial dataset used by FAO has developed over the years from covering only the tropical areas (1990) to the globe (2000). Due to the developments in remote sensing and the compiling of many spatial products relating to climate and land cover between 2000 and 2010, an update to the map was commissioned and resulted in the available GEZ 2010 product .

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Source data

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Global Ecological Zones 

Description 

The purpose of creating the FAO Forest Ecological Zones and associated map is to enable the presentation of some of the FAO forest statistics and maps to be shown by a set of classes that have some ecological meaning that can be more generally understood as broad forest types (e.g. tropical rain forests, boreal forests etc.). 

Spatial resolution

Global coverage

Pixel size:

10km x 10k

Temporal resolution

 GEZ 2010  product