Introduction and context: global biomass resources - Biomass as Energy Source: Resources, Systems and Applications - page 26

Figure 1.18. Dry forest in South Africa (photo E. Dahlquist).
Figure 1.19. Typical landscape in South East Australia, close to Tumut (photo E. Dahlquist).
As can be seen the distribution of arable land is to some extent following where we have a
lot of people, like India, China, Brazil and Indonesia, while some countries have huge surpluses
in relation to their populations like USA, Canada and Russia, especially Canada. In Australia,
we have a lot of this type of land in the southeastern part. A typical landscape of this is seen in
Figure 1.19. Here we have some trees and a lot of grass. At some places, the rain is enough for
more intense farming, while in other areas it is too little.
In areas like the western Asia and south east Europe the climate, also vary between dry and
rainier. In northern Iran close to the Caspian Sea, we have relatively good conditions for farming
and even some forestry like seen in Figure 1.20.
In South EastAsia, on the other hand the climate is tropical and the forests very dense as seen in
Figure 1.21 and Figure 1.22. The growth is very rapid and trees of different kind have developed
a very sophisticated interaction to utilize the available resources in best possible way.