Country

Nepal: 11 ecoregions. Each with its climate now and toward 2050, and its conservation tier.

Nepal compresses eleven ecoregions into one of the world's steepest climatic staircases. Along the southern lowland strip sit the Terai-Duar savanna and grasslands and the imperiled Lower Gangetic Plains moist deciduous forests and Upper Gangetic Plains moist deciduous forests. From there the sequence climbs through the Himalayan subtropical broadleaf forests and Himalayan subtropical pine forests, the Eastern Himalayan broadleaf forests and Western Himalayan broadleaf forests, the subalpine conifer forests, and finally the Palearctic alpine shrub and meadows above treeline. Almost every belt is Himalayan by name; the country is the transect itself. For planting, elevation decides everything: subtropical monsoon conditions near the Indian border, a temperate zone rich in the rhododendron-country broadleaf forests, and short-season alpine conditions above, all within a narrow horizontal distance.