ASIAN BIOREGION LIBRARY
The Asian Bioregional Library encompasses more than 44,600,000 square kilometers (4,460,000,000 hectares / 11,020,000,000 acres) of territory, making it the largest continental library in the system, stretching from Arctic latitudes in Siberia to equatorial forests across Southeast Asia, and from the Mediterranean margins through Central Asia to the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands. Its coastlines extend for nearly 63,000 kilometers along the Arctic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean systems, including the intricate archipelagos of Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as the continental shorelines of Russia, China, India, and the Near East (land area synthesized from widely cited Britannica and United Nations Statistics Division geographic tables; coastline ranges aggregated from global geographic datasets and national coastal measurements). Within this immense framework, the library organizes Asia into major bioregions such as the Siberian tundra and boreal forests, the Central Asian steppe belts, the deserts of Arabia, Iran, Central Asia, and the Gobi, the Himalayan and Tibetan mountain complexes, the fertile temperate zones of East Asia, the monsoon woodlands of South Asia, and the tropical rainforest archipelagos of maritime Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Each region is examined in relation to deep cultural, linguistic, ecological, and artistic histories, including Ainu, Kazakh, Tibetan, Sherpa, Hmong, Orang Asli, Mongolian, Pacific Islander, and many other communities whose lives have been shaped by caravan routes, pilgrimage networks, mountain herding, irrigated agriculture, maritime navigation, and complex cosmologies. The Asian Bioregional Library documents the long historical processes of empire, trade, religious diffusion, agricultural transformation, urbanization, and modern industrial development, while also addressing contemporary challenges such as deforestation, desertification, glacier loss, river system alteration, biodiversity decline, and climate-driven disruptions across densely inhabited landscapes. Parallel attention is given to conservation models, including national parks, sacred forest traditions, community forestry systems, watershed protection programs, and indigenous stewardship practices that maintain ecological resilience and cultural continuity. The library integrates inventories of languages, oral histories, medicinal plants, ritual arts, textiles, ceramics, architecture, poetry, and musical traditions, presenting Asia not as a single civilizational block but as a constellation of interdependent bioregions linked through ecological gradients, historical encounters, and knowledge systems. Through this synthesis grounded in authoritative encyclopedic references, UN geographic statistics, and bioregional scholarship, the Asian Bioregional Library functions as both a scientific reference and a cultural memory archive, oriented toward learning, sustainability, and respect for the living diversity of the continent.
