On May 3, 1887, a major earthquake shook much of the southwest United States and Mexico, an area of nearly two million square kilometers. This seismic event, with an estimated magnitude of 7.2 (DuBois and Sbar, in press), caused 51 deaths in northern Sonora, and major destruction of property in southeast Arizona, as well as adjacent portions of Mexico. Moderate damage also occurred in New Mexico.
The 1887 epicenter was south of the Arizona-Mexico border in the San Bernardino Valley…
More than one third of Forrest Shreve's (1951 ) Sonoran Desert lies within the boundaries of Sonora, the second largest state in Mexico. Five of the seven major vegetational subdivisions of the Sonoran Desert are found within Sonora as well, more than in any other state. It is safe to say that the specific biological diversity found in the Sonoran portion of the Sonoran Desert is greater than in any other desert in the world.
In this paper, we describe and present the results of our effort to establish a spatial delineation of the Mogollon Highlands region—an ecologically fascinating North American transition zone of continental importance. is dramatic landscape of escarpments, canyons, mesas, deserts, and high conifer forests—where the Sonoran Desert of the Basin and Range Province meets the redrock country of the Colorado Plateau and the Southern Rocky Mountains, where the northern limits of some species…
Buffelgrass loves south-facing hillsides in the Sonoran Desert, especially in Sonora. In some cases it replaces nearly all native vegetation except older trees and cactus that persist from before the invasion took place.
This area was cleared and tilled for buffelgrass. Now it is a virtual monoculture of buffelgrass, which provides poor forage for cattle, the whole point of the operation.
The Rock Horned Lizard (Camaleón de Piedra, in Spanish), Phrynosoma ditmarsi, is a poorly known Mexican endemic species with a distribution restricted to the state of Sonora. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has categorized this species as Data Deficient (Frost et al., 2007), but using the Environmental Vulnerability measure (EVS) Wilson et al. (2013) assessed this species with a score of 16, placing it in the middle portion of the high vulnerability…
