Eastern Asia is one of the regions of

temperate In geography, the temperate climates of Earth occur in the middle latitudes (approximately 23.5° to 66.5° N/S of the Equator), which span between the tropics and the polar regions of Earth. These zones generally have wider temperature ran ...

Asia Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...

defined in the

World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions The World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) is a biogeographical system developed by the international Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) organization, formerly the International Working Group on Taxonomic D ...

(WGSRPD) for use in recording the distribution of plants. It is very much smaller than common definitions of

East Asia East Asia is a geocultural region of Asia. It includes China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan, plus two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. The economies of Economy of China, China, Economy of Ja ...

. It consists of the

Korean Peninsula Korea is a peninsular region in East Asia consisting of the Korean Peninsula, Jeju Island, and smaller islands. Since the end of World War II in 1945, it has been politically divided at or near the 38th parallel between North Korea (Dem ...

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

(

Hokkaido is the list of islands of Japan by area, second-largest island of Japan and comprises the largest and northernmost prefectures of Japan, prefecture, making up its own list of regions of Japan, region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō fr ...

Honshu , historically known as , is the largest of the four main islands of Japan. It lies between the Pacific Ocean (east) and the Sea of Japan (west). It is the list of islands by area, seventh-largest island in the world, and the list of islands by ...

Kyushu is the third-largest island of Japan's Japanese archipelago, four main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands (i.e. excluding Okinawa Island, Okinawa and the other Ryukyu Islands, Ryukyu (''Nansei'') Ryukyu Islands, Islands ...

and

Shikoku is the smallest of the List of islands of Japan#Main islands, four main islands of Japan. It is long and between at its widest. It has a population of 3.8 million, the least populated of Japan's four main islands. It is south of Honshu ...

, plus associated offshore islands – the

Volcano Islands The or are a group of three Japanese-governed islands in Micronesia. They lie south of the Ogasawara Islands and belong to the municipality of Ogasawara, Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolis, Japan. The islands are all active volcanoes lying ato ...

(Kazan-retto), the

Ryukyu Islands The , also known as the or the , are a chain of Japanese islands that stretch southwest from Kyushu to Geography of Taiwan, Taiwan: the Ryukyu Islands are divided into the Satsunan Islands (Ōsumi Islands, Ōsumi, Tokara Islands, Tokara and A ...

(Nansei-shoto) and the

Bonin Islands The Bonin Islands, also known as the , is a list of islands of Japan, Japanese archipelago of over 30 subtropical and Island#Tropical islands, tropical islands located around SSE of Tokyo and northwest of Guam. The group as a whole has a total ...

(Ogasawara-shoto)), and

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

. Some islands belonging to Japan politically, such as Marcus Island (Minami-Tori-shima), have greater floristic affinity with similar Pacific islands and are placed in the botanical continent of the Pacific.

WGSRPD system

The WGSRPD is a biogeographical system developed by the international Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) organization. The system provides clear definitions and codes for recording

plant Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with c ...

distributions at four scales or levels, from "botanical continents" down to parts of large countries. The top two levels are given numerical codes. The botanical continent 3 Asia-Temperate has nine regions, one of which is 38 Eastern Asia. Organizations and works using the scheme include the

International Union for Conservation of Nature The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. Founded in 1948, IUCN has become the global authority on the stat ...

(IUCN), the

Germplasm Resources Information Network Germplasm Resources Information Network or GRIN is an online USDA National Genetic Resources Program software project to comprehensively manage the computer database for the holdings of all plant germplasm collected by the National Plant Germpla ...

(GRIN), and the

World Checklist of Selected Plant Families The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (usually abbreviated to WCSP) was an "international collaborative programme that provides the latest peer reviewed and published opinions on the accepted scientific names and synonyms of selected p ...

(WCSP). For example, the entry for '' Lilium concolor'' in the WCSP includes the numerical codes "30 31 36 37 38", the initial "3" showing these are all regions of Asia-Temperate, with "38" being Eastern Asia.

Eastern Asia subdivisions

The Eastern Asia region is subdivided into areas and "basic recording units", which are given letter codes:

Changes

Some small changes were made to the Eastern Asia region between the first and second editions of the WGSRPD. The

(Kazan-retto) and the

(Ogasawara-shoto) were moved from the Pacific botanical continent to Eastern Asia within Asia-Temperate as they have many

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found only in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also foun ...

plants in common with Eastern Asia.

References

Bibliography

*{{citation , last=Brummitt , first=R.K. , year=2001 , title=World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions: Edition 2 , publisher=International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases For Plant Sciences (TDWG) , url = http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/tdwg/TDWG_geo2.pdf , access-date = 2006-11-27 Biogeography Geography of East Asia

WGSRPD system

Eastern Asia subdivisions

Changes

See also

References

Bibliography