Country

Mali: 5 ecoregions. Each with its climate now and toward 2050, and its conservation tier.

Mali runs north to south across Africa's great rainfall gradient, and its five ecoregions read like a transect. The Saharan north lies in the South Sahara desert, with the West Saharan montane xeric woodlands rising from it in the Adrar country; the center crosses the vast Sahelian Acacia savanna; the south reaches the West Sudanian savanna, the wettest and most wooded zone. Threaded through the middle, the Inner Niger Delta flooded savanna is the anomaly - a seasonally inundated wetland fed by the river in the midst of the Sahel. Growing conditions hinge almost entirely on that gradient: a short, unreliable rainy season in the Sahel lengthening southward, and true desert in the north where only the river or an oasis makes planting possible.