u/messthrill

Aka Edoras from Lord of the Rings. South Island, New Zealand

I can't tell you how many times I stopped to look up as I hiked through the mountains around Stowe. Just look at this!?

Ecosystem engineers are such a fascinating group in ecology and a reminder that we aren’t the only species that heavily modifies their environment. I can think of no more classic an example than the beaver.

This is the Itaimbezinho Canyon, located right on the border of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina in Brazil. Credits for this amazing sequence go to the photographer Gabriel Ramos.

The scale of this place is just hard to process from a regular photo. It runs for about 3.6 miles and those vertical basalt walls drop straight down for over 2,300 feet (720 meters) into the gorge.

What makes it look even more surreal is that distinct dense green canopy covering the plateaus. Those pointy trees are actually Araucarias (Brazilian pines). They are super unique prehistoric conifers native to the high-altitude regions down there. Also, because it's pretty close to the Atlantic coast, heavy ocean mist constantly rolls over the top of the canyon, which creates that moody fog effect sitting inside the rift.

Upper picture taken in 2008, lower picture taken in 2026. The area is getting depopulated but the nature is healing

This map depicts the boundaries of ecoregions on Borneo on a relief map. The colors represent the following areas:

Borneo Lowland Rainforests (turquoise)
Borneo Montane Rainforests (white)
Kinabalu Montane Alpine Meadows (small dark blue spot on north part of island)
Borneo Peat Swamp Forests (purple)
Southwest Borneo Freshwater Swamp Forests (green)
Sunda Shelf Mangroves (magenta)
Sundaland Heath Forests (red)

A photo of what was once the riverbed, now overgrown.

Some pics from a day hike on High Divide loop in Olympic National Park in Washington. This was early June and we were fortunate to be able to do the whole loop so early in the summer. Just a few navigable snow spots. The bears were a surprise and the views of Mt Olympus were pretty amazing. One of my favorite hikes. A bit tough at 19 miles for a day hike but it was very rewarding.

Edit - re-post, mods nuked first post I guess because title didn't wasn't formatted correctly.

When I look at this map, it seems like every ecoregion has reasonable boundaries, with perhaps the exception of the Celtic Broadleaf Forests ecoregion. I’ve never quite understood why biogeographers gave it those boundaries back in 2001 with their publication “Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World” and yet again in 2017 with “An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting the Terrestrial Realm.” It’s not that they were incapable of nuance. There are plenty of ecoregions that only cover minute areas of land, but the Celtic Broadleaf Forests ecoregion seems to me too broad to be useful. I think that it would have made more sense to have defined another ecoregion that covered uplands such as Snowdonia in Wales.

If I were able to talk to the biogeographers who made these boundaries, I would love to ask them the thought process behind why they made it that way.