Wildlife of Tagmatium
Most of Tagmatium is dominated by a hemiboreal climate zone, which has then informed its biodiversity. Historically, before significant human impact on the floral and fauna of Tagmatium, it would have been dominated by hemiboreal forests. These are forests that have some of the characteristics of a boreal forest, but also have features shared with temperate-zone forests to the geographic south. This means that coniferous forests tend to dominate but a significant number of deciduous species also occur. Within this climate zone, there are many smaller variations. The lands around the Central Sea are low-lying, mainly consisting of plains and rolling hills, whilst to the north of that, it becomes the High Plains region, which is dominated by open plains, as the name suggests. To the west are the broad, fertile floodplains of the Iaehos river. The other major ecoregions within Tagmatium is the cold semi-arid desert in the north of the country, the Tzankheian Desert, and the mountain range of the Ouranodistrision mountains. There is still a significant amount of forest in Tagmatium, despite a long history of agriculture, which has enabled many species remain, although numbers of many of these declined over the 20th Century.
This means that Tagmatium is rich in wildlife, including some large species of mammal, both carnivores and herbivores. Carnivores include animals such as lynx, wolves, bears, wildcats, foxes, otters, grey seals and the Tagmatine leopard. The herbivore species include wild boar, roe deer, red deer, badgers, elk, bison, wild goat Many of these, especially the large carnivores, suffered from years of persecution at the hands of humans. For example, the Tagmatine leopard, although long a symbol of the country, was almost hunted to extinction in the mid 20th Century and was able to cling on to very marginal lands. A similar fate befell the bison, especially as it encroached on farmland before and during the Long War due to more of its range being turned over to both arable and livestock farming. This pattern was seen across most of the large mammals in Tagmatium, especially as agriculture became more intensive and Tagmatium started to build its economy on the export of grains. However, over the last several decades, ecological policies have been successful in reversing many of these losses, especially in the case of the leopard and the bison.
In recent years, the Tagmatine government has pursued a policy of rewilding certain areas of the country, as well as encouraging farmers to use less intensive methods and reduce the amount of pesticides on their crops. This has been somewhat successful in reversing the trends of wildlife decline, although it has yet to be able to truly reverse the downward trend seen across almost all species of wildlife that had taken place over the course of the mid to late 1900s. Similarly, activities such as logging and mining are now closely controlled, which has gone some way to prevent biodiversity loss, especially of ancient woodland. This had become rare in many places in Tagmatium.
