An area supporting some vegetation beyond the northern limit of trees, between the upper limit of trees and the lower limit of perennial snow on mountains, and on the fringes of the Antarctic continent and its neighboring islands. The term is of Lapp or Russian origin, signifying treeless plains of northern regions. Biologists, and particularly plant ecologists, sometimes use the term tundra in the sense of the vegetation of the tundra landscape. Tundra has distinctive characteristics as a kind of landscape and as a biotic community, but these are expressed with great differences according to the geographic region.