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Science 4 April 1986:
Vol. 232. no. 4746, pp. 27 - 34
DOI: 10.1126/science.232.4746.27
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Articles

High-Resolution Climatic Analysis and Southwest Biogeography

RONALD P. NEILSON 1

1 Research associate with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.

Meteorologists and climatologists have produced significant new data on the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere, thus allowing biologists to examine more closely the cause-effect relation between the large-scale structure of the atmosphere and the dominant patterns of global biogeography. The inability to characterize the high-frequency variability of the weather has constrained such efforts. A method that allows year-to-year patterns of weather variability to be characterized in the contexts of global warming and cooling trends is applied in a combined analysis of long-term monthly weather records and data from an ecological monitoring project in southern New Mexico. The analysis suggests a cause-effect hypothesis of recent desertification in the North American Southwest. The links between the atmosphere and the biosphere are based on the fundamentally different responses to specific weather regimes of semidesert grasses with a C4 photosynthetic pathway and desert shrubs with a C3 photosynthetic pathway. The hypothesis appears to be of sufficient generality to explain the complex, but well-documented, floristic changes that have occurred in the same region since the last glacial maximum.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Soil Erosion and Vegetation in Grasslands of the Peloncillo Mountains, New Mexico.
W.H. Moir, J.A. Ludwig, and R.T. Scholes (2000)
Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J. 64, 1055-1067
   Abstract »    Full Text »
Reorganization of an arid ecosystem in response to recent climate change.
J. H. Brown, T. J. Valone, and C. G. Curtin (1997)
PNAS 94, 9729-9733
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »
Biogeography.
R.L. Jones (1987)
Progress in Physical Geography 11, 133-145
   PDF »


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