Country

Chile: 10 ecoregions. Each with its climate now and toward 2050, and its conservation tier.

Chile's ten ecoregions read like a north-to-south rainfall transect. The Atacama desert anchors the arid north alongside the high, cold Central Andean puna and Central Andean dry puna; the center holds the Chilean Matorral, the country's slice of mediterranean forests, woodlands and scrub with its wet-winter, dry-summer rhythm; and the south turns wet and cool through the Valdivian temperate forests down to the Magellanic subpolar forests and Patagonian steppe. Two remote island ecoregions, the Juan Fernández Islands temperate forests and the Rapa Nui and Sala y Gómez subtropical forests, are small but distinct. For gardeners the mediterranean center is the pivot: summer-dry adapted plants thrive there, while the south favors cool-temperate forest species and the north demands true desert plants or irrigation.