A floristic province is a geographic area with a relatively uniform composition of plant species. Adjacent floristic provinces do not usually have a sharp boundary, but rather a soft one, a transitional area in which many species from both regions overlap. The region of overlap is called a vegetation tension zone.
Several systems of floristic provinces have been devised. Most systems are organized hierarchically, with the largest units subdivided into smaller geographic areas, which are made up of smaller floristic communities, and so on. Systems of floristic provinces have both significant similarities and differences with zoogeographic provinces, which follow the composition of mammalfamilies, and with biogeographical provinces or terrestrial ecoregions, which take into account both plant and animal species.
Botanist Ronald Good identified six floristic kingdoms (boreal, Neotropical, Paleotropical, South African, Australian, and Antarctic), the largest natural units he determined for flowering plants. Good's six kingdoms are subdivided into smaller units, called provinces. The Paleotropical kingdom is divided into three subkingdoms, which are each subdivided into floristic provinces. Each of the other five kingdoms are subdivided directly into provinces. There is a total of 37 floristic provinces. Almost all provinces are further subdivided into floristic regions.
Armen Takhtajan, in a widely used scheme that builds on Good's work, identified thirty-five floristic regions, each of which is subdivided into floristic provinces, of which there are 152 in all.
Map of Pakistan, showing boundaries of the four provinces (Baluchistan, Sind, Punjab, and North-West Frontier), one territory (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), and the Pakistani-administered portion of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region (Azad Kashmir and Northern Areas).
Two of these provinces, the Southern Iranian and Sindian Provinces, belong to the Sudano-Zambezian Region (African Subkingdom, Paleotropical Kingdom), which extends west along the southern Arabian Peninsula through the Horn of Africa to eastern tropical Africa and across to the Atlantic coast of Mauritania, Senegal, and Guinea.
The other three floristicprovinces in Pakistan belong to the Irano-Turanian Region (Tethyan Subkingdom, Holoarctic Kingdom): the Northern Baluchistan and Western Himalayan Provinces in the Western Asiatic Subregion, and the Tibetan Province to the Central Asiatic Subregion.
A floristicprovince is a geographic area with a relatively uniform composition of plant species.
Adjacent floristicprovinces do not usually have a sharp boundary, but rather a soft one, a transitional area in which many species from both regions overlap.
Systems of floristicprovinces have both significant similarities and differences with zoogeographic provinces, which follow the composition of mammal families, and with biogeographical provinces or terrestrial ecoregions, which take into account both plant and animal species.
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