Ecological climate zonation of Iran

There is a very close relationship between two distributions of climate and vegetation maps. But, the relation between climate and vegetation is not clear. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to determine the effect of main climatic factors on distribution of main vegetal species and its zonation in Iran. For this purpose, 51 synoptic stations with 30-year data (1976-2005) or more were selected and their meteorological data were extracted. Using principal components techniques, 269 ​​climatic variables were considered and the numbers of variables reduced to 14 factors with eigenvalues ​​more than one that represent 96.4% of the total variance. The first three factors (the thermal component, moisture and precipitation, respectively) had the most influence on the climate, so, they were considered for climate zonation criteria. These three components were rasterized within ArcGIS using Kriging interpolation method. Resulted raster map was used to create the climatic zonation map by unsupervised clustering technique. Finally, ecological climate zonationmap was derived using two climate parameters (temperature and humidity) and elevation map of country and by using unsupervised clustering technique. This map shows that the boundaries of ecological climate regions are mainly based on climatic (temperature and humidity) and landform factors (elevation). Another result of the research was that most ecological climatic zones were related to the low elevation areas of the country (below 1200 m) and the rate of high ecological climatic areas (above 2400 m) were very low.