The types of plants or life forms: herbs, shrubs, tall and tall trees can be an important criterion for delimiting biomes. In addition, the annual primary productivity of ecosystems associated with the biome.
The types of plants or life forms: herbs, shrubs, tall and tall trees can be an important criterion for delimiting biomes. In addition, the annual primary productivity of ecosystems associated with the biome.
My answer is that it depends upon the purpose for which you are doing the classification. In Queensland, Australia, the officers who wanted to assess suitability of properties for inclusion in national parks used the "regional ecosystems" as the basis. See Sattler and Williams' benchmark book. They assessed the proportion of regional ecosystems that were already protected legally.
Other bases could be "communities of interest" – used for local government administration; "land-use" – used to identify suitability for grazing, cropping, wilderness, hunting and gathering et cetera; "catchments" – used where water volumes and quality are particularly significant.