Deserts
California's high mountains block most moisture from reaching the eastern parts of the state, which are home to California's desert and xeric shrub ecoregions. The low desert of southeastern California is part of the Sonoran desert ecoregion, which extends into Arizona and parts of northern Mexico. California has two high deserts: the Mojave desert and the Great Basin Desert. The Mojave desert ecoregion is marked by the presence of Joshua trees. The dry cold Great Basin desert of California consists of the Owens Valley, and is classified into Great Basin shrub steppe by the WWF, and into the Central Basin and Range ecoregion by the EPA.
The deserts in California receive between 2 to 10 inches (51 to 250 mm) of rain per year. Plants in these deserts are brush and scrub, adapted to the low rainfall. Common plant species include creosote bush, blackbrush, greasewood, saltbush, big sagebrush, low sagebrush, and shadscale. Higher elevations have more precipitation, which allows drought-resistant trees to grow, such as western juniper and pinyon pine.
Read more about this topic: Ecology Of California
Famous quotes containing the word deserts:
“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“No Raven’s wing can stretch the flight so far
As the torn bandrols of Napoleon’s war.
Choose then your climate, fix your best abode,
He’ll make you deserts and he’ll bring you blood.
How could you fear a dearth? have not mankind,
Tho slain by millions, millions left behind?
Has not conscription still the power to weild
Her annual faulchion o’er the human field?
A faithful harvester!”
—Joel Barlow (1754–1812)
“In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)