Mediterranean Basin

The Mediterranean Basin ecosystem surrounds the Mediterranean Sea across southern Europe, North Africa and the Levant, and is the ecosystem that gave the Mediterranean climate type its name: hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters, a pattern shared by only a handful of regions worldwide, including California's chaparral, central Chile, South Africa's Cape Fynbos and parts of southwestern Australia. It is recognized as one of the world's great biodiversity hotspots, holding tens of thousands of plant species, a large share of them found nowhere else, adapted to survive the long summer drought through hardened, often aromatic leaves, deep root systems and, in many cases, tolerance of periodic fire. Its characteristic vegetation, shaped by many thousands of years of grazing, cultivation and burning alongside the natural climate, ranges from evergreen sclerophyll forest to the dense shrubland known locally as maquis and the more open, low scrub called garrigue. Few regions on Earth have been so continuously shaped by human settlement and agriculture for so long, and the basin's wild landscapes today sit in close, often blurred proximity with olive groves, vineyards and grazing land that have themselves become part of the region's ecological character.