Sierra Madre Occidental Pine-oak Forests - Setting

Setting

The Sierra Madre Occidental run north to south in western Mexico from the centre of the country up towards the United States border, where the northern extent of the ecoregion consists of patches of forest on the Madrean Sky Islands sticking up out of the desert in the Mexican state of Sonora and in the US in Arizona and New Mexico. This is a dramatic landscape of steep mountains cut through with canyons including Copper Canyon, the deepest in North America.

The ecoregion consists of a complex of high elevation pine-oak forest enclaves surrounded at lower elevations by deserts and xeric shrublands and tropical dry forests at lower elevations, including the Sonoran Desert to the northwest, the Chihuahuan Desert to the northeast and east in Arizona, the Meseta Central matorral and Central Mexican matorral to the southeast, and the Sinaloan dry forests to the west and southwest. The Sierra Madre Occidental pine-oak forests are one of the Madrean pine-oak forests ecoregions, which are found throughout the Sierra Madre ranges of Mexico and the US Southwest.

Read more about this topic:  Sierra Madre Occidental Pine-oak Forests

Famous quotes containing the word setting:

    We don’t arrive at it by standing on one leg or on the first day of our setting out—but though we may jostle one another on the way that is no reason why we should strike or trample—elbowing’s enough.
    George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)

    With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)