July 26, 2013
Las Cruces, NM
In my blog post last month, I talked about how people from the Northeast perceive the Southwest, but I forgot to include one important observation. People on the east coast generally think that New Mexico and Arizona are interchangeable. I can’t tell you how many times someone at school asked me when I was moving to Arizona after I had informed them a few weeks earlier that I was going to live in New Mexico after graduation. Now that I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Arizona, I can tell you firsthand that Arizona and New Mexico are entirely different, both culturally and ecologically. I won’t delve too much into the cultural differences (let’s just say golf courses are much more common in Arizona than in New Mexico…), but the ecologically differences are astounding. To an outsider, the two states are superficially similar seeing as they are both covered in desert. However, the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona and the Chihuahuan Desert surrounding Las Cruces host immensely different ecological communities.
The Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico is located at a higher elevation, making it cooler than the Sonoran Desert and more prone to freezing temperatures in the winter. The Chihuahuan Desert also has a single rainy season during the summer monsoon months, whereas the Sonoran has two distinct rainy seasons, enabling it to have the highest plant diversity of all the desert ecosystems in North America. These environmental differences have left the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts with strikingly different plant communities. For instance, even an outsider would take note of the curious absence of Saguaro Cacti—the quintessential cactus portrayed in desert cartoons everywhere—in New Mexico. Let me repeat that. Despite the countless New Mexican postcards with the silhouettes of Saguaros set against a southwestern sunset, there are no Saguaros in New Mexico.
Saguaro National Park located outside of Tucson, AZ
In terms of fieldwork, we have successfully completed our first two Seeds of Success collections! The monsoon season, which typically lasts from the beginning of July until the end of August, has begun, and patches of green and wildflowers are starting to speckle the formerly dry and dormant Chihuahuan landscape. Because there are only two botanists in the state of New Mexico (the other is located in Farmington), our mentor, Mike Howard, is responsible for monitoring the vegetation of about 11 million acres of public land. Needless to say, we have spent a large proportion of our time driving to distant field sites scattered around the state. In addition to collecting the seeds of two different populations and varieties of Honey Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa), we have also begun monitoring over a dozen other plant populations for potential future collections! I anticipate that the coming months will hold many additional SOS collection opportunities.
Field site north of Lordsburg, NM where we completed our first SOS collection
Honey Mesquite or Prosopis glandulosa–the plant species we collected for our first two SOS collections.
Our mentor, Mike, is a very dedicated photographer.
Like last month, I will end my blog post with some terminology I have picked up during my stay in southern New Mexico:
Virga: An apparent streak of precipitation that evaporates before it reaches the ground. The word virga is derived from the Latin word for “twig” or “branch,” which is appropriate because like virga, the branches of a tree never touch the ground.
Plinking: Southern New Mexico/west Texas slang for target practice, which is a common recreation activity in many of the field sites we visit.
8-inch Rainfall: In the desert, this term is not used when we have 8 inches of rainfall, but rather when the raindrops are falling 8-inches apart from one another (in other words, there is barely any rain).
Desert Pinstripes: A term that refers to the appearance of your vehicle after you have been driving off-road through thorny shrubs such as Acacia and Mesquite.
-Elisabeth Ward