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.