A cool feature of wetlands, is cattails and wild rice. Rice is a very good crop for this climate, as it can have up to five harvests per year, which is more than worth the amount of labour put into it. Cattails have served in more temperate climates, and even cold ones as a good source of emergency for sedentary groups or even common food in nomadic groups.
Absolutely, it's really hard to look past rice as a food source, even in fictional settings, because it's so exceptionally efficient at feeding large numbers of people. I've tried to find what % of our global food intake is rice, but all I can find is that it's the number 1 consumed food, and makes up 80% of the diet of 50% of humans. Any fictional civilizations are going to want something similar!
This biome is definitely the perfect place for a tree idea I have. A tree that can produce an inedible fruit which has a string-like material instead of the regular mesocarp of fruits. Adapted for making the seeds inside float on bodies of water so that it can spread. The string it produces is also used by a country for clothing and armor.
Slight correction for 8:52 Peatlands are not necessarily acidic. Bogs always are, but fens could be slightly acidic, but are more often neutral or alkaline. It doesn't really matter, but since it was brought up anyways, I figured I'd mention it.
Info is organized super-well. I'm gonna have to reference those recaps in my own worldbuilding project. I'm liking the growing list of intelligent species, and the willingness to throw curveballs. Octopi on land? With sticks? Nice.
Thanks for the positive feedback! Glad everything's been useful to you :) I liked designing the Visomnis (and their descendants... spoilers hehe) I think they add a unique but still recognisable flavour to the setting.
Something I feel like mentioning is that on Earth, you can see Cwa climates in inland tropical regions, most notably the region in Africa centred on Zambia, but also in Ethiopia and parts of Mexico. The reason why these climates exist actually has nothing to do with the forces that create humid subtropical climates in more temperate latitudes! They're more like highland savanna climates, being at high enough altitudes that they're not consistently warm enough to be considered Aw under the Köppen system.
Ooh, the climate area I call home! I've lived in multiple parts of the Southern US, being Atlanta, Dallas, and Baton Rouge. While they're all hot and humid, falling within the Cwa climate region, there's still plenty of variation in the weather and local climate. Dallas is considerably hotter and the most tornado prone of the 3 cities, but it's far less humid than the others. Dallas regularly experiences stretches of time in the summer where the high temperature is over 100°F (38°C), sometimes for several weeks straight. It can be quite brutal, I'll be honest. Since Dallas is just west of the furthest westward extent of the Gulf of Mexico, moisture has a harder time working west over land, thus making Dallas relatively drier, though it still gets 38" (962 mm) of rain a year. Atlanta is the coldest of the 3, rarely does it get much above 95°F (35°C) in the summer, as it's considerably higher in elevation at almost 1100 feet above sea level. Atlanta is also subject to small scale orthographic lift, as the western faces of the hills and mountains in the area tend to be slightly wetter and more lush, though not by much. Those same hills and mountains also tend to have small tornado shadows, if you will, on their eastern faces. My hometown is situated just east of a line of hills and rarely gets hit, but just 30 miles further east (Atlanta itself) tends to be more tornado prone relative to my hometown. Baton Rouge... Yeah, you're just walking through soupy air, there's no two ways about it. It's so low in elevation (20'/7m or 56'/17m) and very close to the Gulf of Mexico, so it's hot and humid almost year round. It's also very close to the tropics, so Baton Rouge sees less seasonal variation, as winters regularly feature high temperatures near 80°F (27°C), though it has been known to snow about twice a decade there, believe it or not! I can't say I've experienced Baton Rouge snow (something I can't say for the other two cities, which have had major snow events in the last decade), but it's really wild seeing an Interstate 12 sign or the state capitol building grounds covered with snow. Case in point: Humid subtropical climates are not monolithic! They're heavily influenced by surrounding climate types and local geography. They'll all feel similar, but as someone who's lived in the Southern US for 22 years, I can tell you plenty of differences in the local climate
Not particularly pertinent to this video, but at some point I’d love to see a video on the types of rocks that appear in different regions and how to place them. Specifically rocks, not mined minerals. I’m wondering more for the visual appearance of specific regions (ie: the canadian shield with its hills and visible metamorphic rock, underlined by pink granite which you can see along highways carved out with dynamite; or the mesas of the american midwest with their beautiful stripes of sedimentary rock) This would also be nice to have for architectural purposes, since available building materials affect the look of buildings (what would Greece be without marble?) Anyways, wonderful video as always. I love this channel so much, and it works excellently when used alongside Artifexian’s videos, since this channel’s videos go into so much more depth on each specific topic.
I wanna start by saying I appreciate this video. I think you did a great job of breaking down climates and their different aspects. The organization of the video was also well-done as you moved from general to more particular ideas. I do want to try and expand the content by providing a little more nuance to the relationship between the climate zones, environment and ecosystem. I disagree that plants in the subtropics don't have to worry about fire ( 5:41 ). For example, in the US Southeast the ecosystem and environment were dominated by fire, Wiregrass, and the Longleaf Pine. These trees ooze extremely flammable sap, litter the ground with needles that dry quickly and burn faster, grow thick bark plates that provide additional litter and protect the inner wood from fire, self-prune lower limbs to keep their canopy above the flames, grow as tall as they can just begging to be struck by lightning and ignite during a storm. If only one in a whole forest is struck it is still enough to clear the floor for their progeny to germinate. Now in the US Southeast there is little fire. Humans can, and do, put out naturally occurring fires, but the primary factor is the absence of Longleafs. This allowed for oaks to become the dominant influence on the ecosystem. The oaks grow thick and nearly impenetrable root mats, drop large matting leaves, root sucker, and form a shroud of dense canopies that hide the ground from sunlight. These trees maximize moisture and limit fire. The climate is extremely important for worldbuilding but these two types of trees should stand as prime examples of how organisms mold their environment just as much as the environment molds them. There are dialectical, that is to say back and forth or dynamic, relationships between the environment and the ecosystem and the climate. Your hypothesis about subtropical plants growing without fear of wildfire ( 5:41 ) would be correct except the Longleaf yearns for the chance to start a fire, in spite of the summer moisture, to clear out the competition. The Longleaf increases the likelihood of forest fires and their intensity. The Longleaf is an actor, it is not solely acted upon. Human beings also stand as prime examples of this dialectical relationship as anthropogenic climate change looms over us. This video is wonderful and I think the concepts presented here could be taken further. If one keeps these relationships in mind their worlds will feel real and lived in by actual organisms.
Thanks for the feedback! You're absolutely right, the comment regarding less worry of wildfire in the subtropics is mostly in comparison to other climate zones, especially compared to savannah and Mediterranean climates, where wildfire is far more abundant. Wildfires can certainly occur in the subtropics, and here in the Australian subtropics we also have notorious fire-starting flora, with a diverse range of eucalyptus that are adapted for the subtropical climate. Great comment!
Humid subtropical climates and wetlands are very...interesting in terms of worldbuilding. Wetlands, especially in hot climates, tend to have a lot of diseases, also a lot of bugs there are poisonous/venemous, but to a lesser degree than in the tropics. Also, from what I could gather as a historian, the Cfa climates, when they cover large area, tend to be friendly to populations, since cultures would have the space to develop technologies, trade routes and even the genetic mixting that is well-adapted to water-logging, heat waves and insect-born diseases. China is a primary example of this. However, in smaller, micro-climactic scales, these places easily turn into death traps for their inhabitants. Wetlands are often bad for human development, however, they have a tendency to encourage technological advancement in cultures that interact with them. In terms of cuisine, because these climates can be found on every continent on Earth, you can basically worldbuild anything for fictionnal civilisations. In some hunter-gather groups, grain was absent (namely australian) with some tuber roots replacing them partially. The rice(s) of East Asia and Northern Italy, some parts of the Americas (pratically, some varieties of American wild rice could be gathered and semi-domesticated in wide variety of climates provided there is enough wetlands), but also corn, cassava, taro, potatoes, yam, sweet potatoes and around the Black Sea and Greese, buckwheat and wheat are all examples of basic crops grown in these parts of the world. Marshlands of other climate types are exellent for the growing of light, pourous vegetables, that might become quite popular in their cuisines, and can be located far inland. It often encourages pisciculture, and sometimes algoculture, since the stable sources of freshwater allows for a controlled environment for water crops and livestock, although rather uncommon, mostly done by the French and Chinese, namely of carp and sometimes crayfish. I think in magic settings with loads of undead stuff, the raising of crayfish would be an exellent defense by digging up canals. As the undeads are typically not too solid, slow and clumsy, just surround any cemetary or execution site with fresh water, raise some crayfish in there, and ban building permenant bridges and systematically destroy any, and voilà, the undead problem is solved.
I haven't ever looked too much into this topic, though it is something I plan to do eventually (right now I am just trying to figure out what all I need to look into to get the results I want and where are good sources of information), so I had no idea there was such variety in this biome. I think I might currently live in this biome, too, so huh.
It's definitely a fascinating topic that's got a lot of depth. Can be a bit of a rabbit hole sometimes! My own research for this topic taught me which biome I live in as well (Oceanic). Hope I at least provided enough information for your research to get you started!
If anyone were to ask my opinion, I would suppose that in the Mass Effect universe, the proto-asari evolved in something similar to mangrove swamps, had electrocytes, had electroreception, and had barbels. This is only my opinion.
I love this whole series, but I was wondering, is there somewhere the highlights of these biomes is available in writing? The latitude ranges and other guidelines for placement, in particular? I checked the website, but I wasn't able to find anything like that there. Currently I'm transcribing key bits into a google doc for my own reference, but if there's somewhere it's already gathered, that would be deeply appreciated.
I would like to mention that it always bugs me when people see a very long snake and think it must be comparably thick. For example the largest snake that we know of existing is the titanaboa at 13m around 3/4 of a meter thick at the thickest point. Having a snake that is 1.38x as long and 2x as thick would start looking like a silly sausage creature rather than an elegant tubular predator. Edit: The males would be .69x the length but the same width! And this is ignoring that the titanaboa already looks a touch goody being so much bigger in the middle.
Oh wow, sudden new desert in a previously tropical valley between mountains with a river? How come that happened? I mean, as far as I understand the valley being surrounded by mountains seems to put in rain shadow, but the river looks significant enough to provide irrigation, what am I missing there?
It can be due to shifts in wind over a long period of time or a different global temperature. Artifexian has a hot/cold planet climate video addressing something like this that happened on Earth!
Alright mah dude i gotta say i absolutely love your videos and as im watching through them there is so much useful information that I instantly write down in me worldbuilding notes and incorporate into my own world. But i do have some constructive critisism. You explain a lot but when you show shots of yourself explaining, the hand movements go effin everywhere man😂😂. Not a bad thing necessarily but for me, and as I can imagine for a lot of viewers, it can be pretty distracting. So there, thats my humble, I'd say pretty nicely put opinion. Food for thought. *disappears*
"As an Arachnaphobe, designing this wasn't easy"
I applaud your dedication to this series in the face of your personal fear. It's to be respected.
A cool feature of wetlands, is cattails and wild rice. Rice is a very good crop for this climate, as it can have up to five harvests per year, which is more than worth the amount of labour put into it. Cattails have served in more temperate climates, and even cold ones as a good source of emergency for sedentary groups or even common food in nomadic groups.
Absolutely, it's really hard to look past rice as a food source, even in fictional settings, because it's so exceptionally efficient at feeding large numbers of people. I've tried to find what % of our global food intake is rice, but all I can find is that it's the number 1 consumed food, and makes up 80% of the diet of 50% of humans.
Any fictional civilizations are going to want something similar!
This biome is definitely the perfect place for a tree idea I have. A tree that can produce an inedible fruit which has a string-like material instead of the regular mesocarp of fruits. Adapted for making the seeds inside float on bodies of water so that it can spread. The string it produces is also used by a country for clothing and armor.
Can't express enough how I appreciate these more in depth (while not being exhausting), well presented videos. Great one as always!
Thank you :) Trying to find the balance between 'enough information' and 'too much information' is challenging! Glad you are enjoying!
Slight correction for 8:52 Peatlands are not necessarily acidic. Bogs always are, but fens could be slightly acidic, but are more often neutral or alkaline. It doesn't really matter, but since it was brought up anyways, I figured I'd mention it.
Info is organized super-well. I'm gonna have to reference those recaps in my own worldbuilding project. I'm liking the growing list of intelligent species, and the willingness to throw curveballs. Octopi on land? With sticks? Nice.
Thanks for the positive feedback! Glad everything's been useful to you :)
I liked designing the Visomnis (and their descendants... spoilers hehe) I think they add a unique but still recognisable flavour to the setting.
Something I feel like mentioning is that on Earth, you can see Cwa climates in inland tropical regions, most notably the region in Africa centred on Zambia, but also in Ethiopia and parts of Mexico.
The reason why these climates exist actually has nothing to do with the forces that create humid subtropical climates in more temperate latitudes! They're more like highland savanna climates, being at high enough altitudes that they're not consistently warm enough to be considered Aw under the Köppen system.
Ooh, the climate area I call home! I've lived in multiple parts of the Southern US, being Atlanta, Dallas, and Baton Rouge. While they're all hot and humid, falling within the Cwa climate region, there's still plenty of variation in the weather and local climate.
Dallas is considerably hotter and the most tornado prone of the 3 cities, but it's far less humid than the others. Dallas regularly experiences stretches of time in the summer where the high temperature is over 100°F (38°C), sometimes for several weeks straight. It can be quite brutal, I'll be honest. Since Dallas is just west of the furthest westward extent of the Gulf of Mexico, moisture has a harder time working west over land, thus making Dallas relatively drier, though it still gets 38" (962 mm) of rain a year.
Atlanta is the coldest of the 3, rarely does it get much above 95°F (35°C) in the summer, as it's considerably higher in elevation at almost 1100 feet above sea level. Atlanta is also subject to small scale orthographic lift, as the western faces of the hills and mountains in the area tend to be slightly wetter and more lush, though not by much. Those same hills and mountains also tend to have small tornado shadows, if you will, on their eastern faces. My hometown is situated just east of a line of hills and rarely gets hit, but just 30 miles further east (Atlanta itself) tends to be more tornado prone relative to my hometown.
Baton Rouge... Yeah, you're just walking through soupy air, there's no two ways about it. It's so low in elevation (20'/7m or 56'/17m) and very close to the Gulf of Mexico, so it's hot and humid almost year round. It's also very close to the tropics, so Baton Rouge sees less seasonal variation, as winters regularly feature high temperatures near 80°F (27°C), though it has been known to snow about twice a decade there, believe it or not! I can't say I've experienced Baton Rouge snow (something I can't say for the other two cities, which have had major snow events in the last decade), but it's really wild seeing an Interstate 12 sign or the state capitol building grounds covered with snow.
Case in point: Humid subtropical climates are not monolithic! They're heavily influenced by surrounding climate types and local geography. They'll all feel similar, but as someone who's lived in the Southern US for 22 years, I can tell you plenty of differences in the local climate
Learning a lot through your videos, keep the content up
Cheers from Brazil ✌️
Thanks for the positive feedback! Glad you are learning and enjoying :)
Not particularly pertinent to this video, but at some point I’d love to see a video on the types of rocks that appear in different regions and how to place them. Specifically rocks, not mined minerals. I’m wondering more for the visual appearance of specific regions (ie: the canadian shield with its hills and visible metamorphic rock, underlined by pink granite which you can see along highways carved out with dynamite; or the mesas of the american midwest with their beautiful stripes of sedimentary rock)
This would also be nice to have for architectural purposes, since available building materials affect the look of buildings (what would Greece be without marble?)
Anyways, wonderful video as always. I love this channel so much, and it works excellently when used alongside Artifexian’s videos, since this channel’s videos go into so much more depth on each specific topic.
I wanna start by saying I appreciate this video. I think you did a great job of breaking down climates and their different aspects. The organization of the video was also well-done as you moved from general to more particular ideas.
I do want to try and expand the content by providing a little more nuance to the relationship between the climate zones, environment and ecosystem.
I disagree that plants in the subtropics don't have to worry about fire ( 5:41 ). For example, in the US Southeast the ecosystem and environment were dominated by fire, Wiregrass, and the Longleaf Pine.
These trees ooze extremely flammable sap, litter the ground with needles that dry quickly and burn faster, grow thick bark plates that provide additional litter and protect the inner wood from fire, self-prune lower limbs to keep their canopy above the flames, grow as tall as they can just begging to be struck by lightning and ignite during a storm. If only one in a whole forest is struck it is still enough to clear the floor for their progeny to germinate.
Now in the US Southeast there is little fire. Humans can, and do, put out naturally occurring fires, but the primary factor is the absence of Longleafs.
This allowed for oaks to become the dominant influence on the ecosystem. The oaks grow thick and nearly impenetrable root mats, drop large matting leaves, root sucker, and form a shroud of dense canopies that hide the ground from sunlight. These trees maximize moisture and limit fire.
The climate is extremely important for worldbuilding but these two types of trees should stand as prime examples of how organisms mold their environment just as much as the environment molds them. There are dialectical, that is to say back and forth or dynamic, relationships between the environment and the ecosystem and the climate.
Your hypothesis about subtropical plants growing without fear of wildfire ( 5:41 ) would be correct except the Longleaf yearns for the chance to start a fire, in spite of the summer moisture, to clear out the competition. The Longleaf increases the likelihood of forest fires and their intensity. The Longleaf is an actor, it is not solely acted upon.
Human beings also stand as prime examples of this dialectical relationship as anthropogenic climate change looms over us.
This video is wonderful and I think the concepts presented here could be taken further. If one keeps these relationships in mind their worlds will feel real and lived in by actual organisms.
Thanks for the feedback!
You're absolutely right, the comment regarding less worry of wildfire in the subtropics is mostly in comparison to other climate zones, especially compared to savannah and Mediterranean climates, where wildfire is far more abundant. Wildfires can certainly occur in the subtropics, and here in the Australian subtropics we also have notorious fire-starting flora, with a diverse range of eucalyptus that are adapted for the subtropical climate. Great comment!
That bacteria would serve as an excellent breaker for the ultimus batteries, or they would end up taking too much energy from the plant.
Humid subtropical climates and wetlands are very...interesting in terms of worldbuilding.
Wetlands, especially in hot climates, tend to have a lot of diseases, also a lot of bugs there are poisonous/venemous, but to a lesser degree than in the tropics.
Also, from what I could gather as a historian, the Cfa climates, when they cover large area, tend to be friendly to populations, since cultures would have the space to develop technologies, trade routes and even the genetic mixting that is well-adapted to water-logging, heat waves and insect-born diseases. China is a primary example of this.
However, in smaller, micro-climactic scales, these places easily turn into death traps for their inhabitants.
Wetlands are often bad for human development, however, they have a tendency to encourage technological advancement in cultures that interact with them.
In terms of cuisine, because these climates can be found on every continent on Earth, you can basically worldbuild anything for fictionnal civilisations. In some hunter-gather groups, grain was absent (namely australian) with some tuber roots replacing them partially. The rice(s) of East Asia and Northern Italy, some parts of the Americas (pratically, some varieties of American wild rice could be gathered and semi-domesticated in wide variety of climates provided there is enough wetlands), but also corn, cassava, taro, potatoes, yam, sweet potatoes and around the Black Sea and Greese, buckwheat and wheat are all examples of basic crops grown in these parts of the world.
Marshlands of other climate types are exellent for the growing of light, pourous vegetables, that might become quite popular in their cuisines, and can be located far inland. It often encourages pisciculture, and sometimes algoculture, since the stable sources of freshwater allows for a controlled environment for water crops and livestock, although rather uncommon, mostly done by the French and Chinese, namely of carp and sometimes crayfish.
I think in magic settings with loads of undead stuff, the raising of crayfish would be an exellent defense by digging up canals. As the undeads are typically not too solid, slow and clumsy, just surround any cemetary or execution site with fresh water, raise some crayfish in there, and ban building permenant bridges and systematically destroy any, and voilà, the undead problem is solved.
I haven't ever looked too much into this topic, though it is something I plan to do eventually (right now I am just trying to figure out what all I need to look into to get the results I want and where are good sources of information), so I had no idea there was such variety in this biome. I think I might currently live in this biome, too, so huh.
It's definitely a fascinating topic that's got a lot of depth. Can be a bit of a rabbit hole sometimes! My own research for this topic taught me which biome I live in as well (Oceanic).
Hope I at least provided enough information for your research to get you started!
If anyone were to ask my opinion, I would suppose that in the Mass Effect universe, the proto-asari evolved in something similar to mangrove swamps, had electrocytes, had electroreception, and had barbels. This is only my opinion.
How did you leave out the mangrove forests?
I love this whole series, but I was wondering, is there somewhere the highlights of these biomes is available in writing? The latitude ranges and other guidelines for placement, in particular? I checked the website, but I wasn't able to find anything like that there. Currently I'm transcribing key bits into a google doc for my own reference, but if there's somewhere it's already gathered, that would be deeply appreciated.
I would like to mention that it always bugs me when people see a very long snake and think it must be comparably thick. For example the largest snake that we know of existing is the titanaboa at 13m around 3/4 of a meter thick at the thickest point. Having a snake that is 1.38x as long and 2x as thick would start looking like a silly sausage creature rather than an elegant tubular predator.
Edit: The males would be .69x the length but the same width!
And this is ignoring that the titanaboa already looks a touch goody being so much bigger in the middle.
Oh wow, sudden new desert in a previously tropical valley between mountains with a river? How come that happened? I mean, as far as I understand the valley being surrounded by mountains seems to put in rain shadow, but the river looks significant enough to provide irrigation, what am I missing there?
It can be due to shifts in wind over a long period of time or a different global temperature. Artifexian has a hot/cold planet climate video addressing something like this that happened on Earth!
Alright mah dude i gotta say i absolutely love your videos and as im watching through them there is so much useful information that I instantly write down in me worldbuilding notes and incorporate into my own world. But i do have some constructive critisism. You explain a lot but when you show shots of yourself explaining, the hand movements go effin everywhere man😂😂. Not a bad thing necessarily but for me, and as I can imagine for a lot of viewers, it can be pretty distracting. So there, thats my humble, I'd say pretty nicely put opinion. Food for thought. *disappears*
Bro how do u live in Australia and be an Arachnophobe?
Certified Swamp Classic
The animals in this video convinced me I'd never visit your planet lol
An Arachnophobe from Australia? You poor soul
Summer here is awful with spiders haha. Recently I rode my bike face first into a golden orb spider on its web. Traumatizing.
you literally made a spider you can't kill with your foot you evil human
Really need more cant get enough!
love all content keep up the hard work 💪 👍