Ok, there are a bunch of problems, some were the fault of the process to make the biome map, others were in the formulas and data I was using and some are a part of holdridge system itself.
Problems with the process:
- The colors I had chosen were conflicting heavily while one was painting them, which caused the map to miss a lot of biomes
- The categories I had defined were misleading and sometimes way too broad
Problems with the data:
- I had to tweak Azelor's data a bit in order to be able to generate more accurate results, this change was mostly done to the precipitation categories
- I revised some of the formulas to more accurately represent the categories and their true values.
Problems with Holdridge System:
- The use of bio-temperatures is troublesome and misleading as one approaches higher temperatures, since the formula treats temperatures above 30° as 0° then some of the hotter places end up categorized as cold, for example a desert that varies between 28° and 35° will have a biotemperature of less than 5°, meaning it would be categorized as a boreal desert, when, in fact, is a tropical or subtropical desert.
This means I'll have to tweak the model to make it more accurate for our purposes, it will probably end up looking like the bastard child of Whittaker's biome classification and Holdridge's Life Zones.
UPDATE:
Ok, so I ran a few tests, the model is now much closer to the climates map, I rethinked the biotemperature equations to only divide the temperatures by the number of months below 30°C, that way hot deserts are still represented as such while remaining accurate for the lower temperatures.
I also added a new temperature category to account for the subtropical/warm temperate half step in the holdridge model. That way there is no need to resort to selecting climates with the wand in order to get a half accurate result.
As a result of the tweak in the numbers and equations, there is now "access" to a new, wetter category for tropical forests, which would be similar to the central amazonic jungle where water level can almost reach up to the canopies of the trees. The number tweak also made deserts true to their climates.
The only thing I still have left to do is rethink the categories so that the map makes sense, right now I'm working with a super simplified category system made for test purposes.
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