Chaparral

A biome of evergreen, hard-leaved (sclerophyllous) shrubs and small trees, usually under three meters tall, shaped by a Mediterranean-type climate of hot dry summers and mild wet winters. It occurs in five widely separated regions of the world, all roughly between 30 and 40 degrees latitude: coastal and inland California, the Mediterranean Basin (where the same vegetation type is called maquis or garrigue), central Chile (matorral), southwestern Australia (mallee and kwongan) and South Africa's Cape region (fynbos). Fire is a recurring, formative part of this biome rather than an outside disaster: many chaparral shrubs resprout from a fire-surviving root crown, and some, echoing the giant sequoia's own cones in the Temperate Forest biome, carry seeds that need fire's heat to release or germinate. Despite covering only a small share of the Earth's land surface, the five chaparral regions collectively rank among the richest concentrations of plant diversity found in any biome.