Montana North America

Shasta National Forest: Biotic Communities and Disturbance Regime

Shasta National Forest's Biotic Communities Western North America Alpine Tundra Conditions Western North America Alpine Tundra (WNA Alpine Tundra) ecosystems are found on mountain ranges along the west coast of North America, including the mid-elevations on Mount Shasta (Billings & Meidinger 2015). This ecosystem is characterized by short growing seasons and long winters with high snowpack. Soils in this ecosystem tend to be shallow, rocky, low in organics, and well drained (Billings & Meidinger 2015) . Plant Communities Plants commonly found in the WNA Alpine Tundra ecosystem on Mount Shasta include wildflowers in the genus Eriogonum , like Sulphur Buckwheat ( Eriogonum umbellatum ), and some trees at lower elevations such as Lodgepole Pine ( Pinus contorta ) (Billings & Meidinger 2015; Anderson 2003; United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) & United States Forest Service (USFS) 2016; USDA & USFS 2014) . Sulphur Buckwheat. Source . Sulphur B...

The Canadian Shield

The Canadian Shield consists of over eight million square kilometers of pre-Cambrian “shield”, and is the exposed portion of the ancient geological core of North America. It also includes a small portion of the northeastern United States. Three locations within the Canadian Shield which exhibit varying characteristics in their underlying physical environments are: Baffin Island, an island which belongs to the Canadian territory of Nunavut; La Veredrye Wildlife Reserve in Montcerf-Lytton, a municipality in Quebec, Canada; and Big Falls, a small town in north-central Minnesota. These three locations display three very different climate patterns. Below are climographs representing the climate normals for each location. One characteristic that is shared by the entirety of the Canadian Shield is very thin soil due to glaciation. Baffin Island's soil is primarily permafrost, a permanently frozen layer beneath the earth's surface. Source: nrdc.org The soi...

Alabama

Physical Environment Alabama is the fifth most biodiverse state in the US, ranking first among states east of the Mississippi River (Stein 2002). Alabama contains six distinct Level III Ecoregions which are further divided into more specific Level IV Ecoregions; some of these are illustrated in Figure 1 below. I selected the following three locations based on their spatial distribution and their representation of three distinct ecoregions: Red Mountain, Old Cahawba Prairie, and Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) (Figure 1). Figure 1. Map showing three selected locations within Alabama and their corresponding Level III and Level IV Ecoregions. Data source. Climate Overall, Alabama has a humid subtropical climate type. Between my three selected locations, climate does not vary drastically. One notable difference is in mean precipitation of Bon Secour NWR, which has drier periods in the spring and fall relative to wetter winters and very...

GEOG 3318 Project: Biogeographic Pattern

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