Mapping biomes of Australia based on the Holdridge Life Zone Model

In this paper a new biome map of Australia with one million scale was produced based on the Holdridge Life Zone (HLZ) model. Climate data over the whole Australia from 1983 to 2007 were disposed in order to processed HLZ model and get a biome map. Australia is an extremely dry land, in this study we obtained the area of arid biome was 3 561 674.31 km², occupy 46.35 percent of the continent. When analyzing the effect of climatic variability, we found that in the period of 1983 to 2007, the mean annual temperature has an increasing trend, at the same time the annual precipitation was decreasing. This result reflected to the badly drought in these years.