Swarnendu Banerjee

Introduction In an age where the climate is changing at an unprecedented rate, it is not an exaggeration to say that the issue of whether ecosystem states can be predicted from knowledge of the climate system is of existential importance. Standard works in ecology and vegetation geography (Schimper, 1903; Walter, 1973; Whittaker, 1975; Woodward, 1987) are built on the foundation that climate is the fundamental determinant of the distribution of terrestrial ecosystems.