Link for Spreadsheet 1: Dropbox
Link for Spreadsheet 2: Dropbox
(you can click on the link and go to “File” → “Download” to interact with it. Doing this for Spreadsheet 2 is more important, as it has an explorer tool)
Here is an interpretation of this conversation based on some things I’ve noticed. Not really convinced it’s better than what anyone has proposed, but maybe it could be a different point to consider.
First Spreadsheet
First, I tried to parametrize three values: Temperature, Vegetation, and Rainfall (below found on “new matrix” sheet).
Not that we’d need to actually quantify biomass and give that a number range, I just am not smart enough to give an estimate of biomass within a specific area 
I then condensed things into six larger “buckets” of biomes.
- Forest - An environment with a substantial presence of tall biota. Now includes rainforests.
- Desert - An environment with sparse vegetation and arid/semi-arid conditions, which has a yearly average temperature above 1 Degrees Celsius. This notably excludes polar deserts, which I consider a type of Barren here.
- Tundra - A polar or cold region with ground-cover, semi-arid conditions, and a lack of tall biota.
- Grassland - A temperate, tropical, or warm environment with ground-cover, a lack of tall biota, and atleast semi-arid conditions.
- Barrens - An environment with no or an extremely minimal presence of biota. Similar here, but includes polar-desert-esque environments like ice shelves and frozen environments.
- Heathland - A sparse environment with atleast moderate amounts of rainfall. A new category to catch environments which might not last long and aren’t included conveniently in other categories. I particularly was motivated by the idea of a biome which isn’t dry enough to be a desert, but has sparse vegetation.
I then made some sort of matrix describing when an environment is possible, seen above (found on “new matrix” sheet). X with a red box indicates that the biome cannot exist in this category. This is a bit difficult to read through, and is expressed better in a later part. Just know that I used this as a reference to an index I created, and just shows if a biome can possible exist in a given condition.
This matrix also effectively means that if parameters are in the ranges/categories listed below, they can only be the given biome. And, put another way, these different biomes can only exist on these conditions (found on the “qualifiers” sheet):
Second Spreadsheet
Now to the meat of this interpretation: a combination of the biome name/type and the category of each parameter possible for the biome can result in us giving more unique names to different combinations. In other words - a forest that is cold, with moderate rainfall, and towering vegetation is X name; a forest that is cold, with moderate rainfall and forested vegetation is Y name; a forest that is warm, with semi-arid rainfall and forested vegetation is Z name; etc.
I created an index (“index” sheet) of all the different possibilities of each biome: a forested, semi-arid temperate forest, a forested, semi-arid, tropical forest, etc. Column B is the name of the Biome, and Columns C - R indicates which category of each parameter this specific environment is - X indicating a chosen range. So the first “Forest” biome row shows a forested, temperate, semi-arid forest.
I combine these in Column AI (Named ID) - “ForestedTemperateSemi-Arid” in the first row” - and give that specific ID a name. For example, I called ID “ForestedTemperateSemi-Arid” a “Dry Forest”. This name doesn’t have to be unique for every single possibility - I call numerous things a “Rainforest” as seen in the snip above. It just is a way to more conveniently refer to a type of environment. I did this for every possible combination of every biome: this results in 113 combinations, which I gave 49 unique names to.
The “patch identifier explorer” spreadsheet uses this index to give you the name of a particular combination of parameters. Move the Xs around on each parameter, and it will return the name of the patch and the biome type this name is. This lets you walk out a potential story of a specific piece of land, and review whether you agree with the biome classification and patch-name of these parameters: what if a cold environment goes from sparse, to ground cover, then warms up to temperate, increases rainfall, etc?
This Interpretation Summarized
I’m honestly not fully sure how useful this is or how much it assuages any concerns, but I guess this is the essence of it.
- Six types of “Biomes” exist.
- Three parameters are influential in the naming of a patch, interacting with a biome. A specific combination of these biomes plus the biome name results in a regional biome name.
So a larger region might be “Barren”, but specific areas within that region could be a “Frozen Wasteland”, then “Badlands”, then “Mudlands”, etc.
Caveats
- How we measure the amount of biota should be a purposeful decision. I think biomass would be a decent proxy, but we still need to be sure. Maybe if X% of biomass is represent by biota which are above X feet, the category changes to forested and towering?
- Rainfall should also be purposefully discussed. I had an inconsistent treatment of rainfall in cold and polar regions. In some cases, snowfall counted in my head; but tundras are unique in that not much actual rainfall occurs, but permafrost and ice can make water accessible.
- The index doesn’t have any say on how realistic different possibilities of parameters are. Can there be an arid environment with ground cover? Can there be a sweltering temperature environment with massive trees? It doesn’t have a say on this - I just gave names to different things.
- This assumes Rainfall, Temperature, and Vegetation Amount to exist, and no other parameters. I’m not sure what the full list of parameters will be, as well as how they will interact with each other. My intuition tells me that we should make only a few parameters influential for things like naming, and have derived parameters which might further diversify gameplay, but don’t alter the name. I’d assume these “secondary parameters” would have a relationship with our larger parameters, so that “Rainfall”, “Temperature”, and “Vegetation Amounts” (assuming those are the primary parameters) strongly effect the derived parameters.
- This currently doesn’t have any sort of interaction with special patch features, like wetlands, rivers, hills, mountains, etc. I have some sort of an idea for how those can be handled that I can can be demonstrated here, but I didn’t write them down here yet.
- Numbers of parameter ranges are completely open to change, as well as the name for any biome.