Contemporary Fire Regimes Provide a Critical Perspective on Restoration Needs in the Mexico-United States Borderlands

The relationship between people and wildfire has always been paradoxical: fire is an essential ecological process and management tool, but can also be detrimental to life and property. Consequently, fire regimes have been modified throughout history through both intentional burning to promote benefits and active suppression to reduce risks. Reintroducing fire and its benefits back into the Sky Island mountains of the United States-Mexico borderlands has the potential to reduce adverse effects of altered fire regimes and build resilient ecosystems and human communities.

Patterns and drivers of long-term changes in breeding bird communities in a global biodiversity hotspot in Mexico

Aim: To evaluate changes in breeding bird communities and assess implications for conservation.

Location: Madrean Sky Islands and northern Sierra Madre Occidental, Mexico. Methods: I compared observations from recent fieldwork (2009–2012) with an extensive historical data set (1887–1954) and used modelling and multivariate techniques to assess spatiotemporal changes in species occurrence, richness and assemblage composition, and associations with climate, land use and landscape factors.

Madrean Archipelago Rapid Ecoregional Assessment - Executive Summary

Executive Summary

This executive summary describes the breadth of the entire Madrean Archipelago (MAR) Rapid Ecoregional Assessment (REA) and illustrates examples from all of the products. It does not summarize methods but instead focuses on products, key findings, and limitations. Because of the breadth and number of assessments, this summary is necessarily longer than a typical executive summary and is intended to give a brief but fairly complete picture of the MAR REA results.

Rapid Ecoregional Assessments: Purpose and Scope

Distribution, Abundance, Habitat, and Biogeography of Breeding Birds in the Sky Islands and adjacent Sierra Madre Occidental of northwest Mexico

This report summarizes my efforts to describe the distribution, abundance, habitat, and biogeographical relationships of breeding birds in montane vegetation communities in the Sky Islands and adjacent Sierra Madre Occidental of northwest Mexico. Following extensive commercial logging in the early and mid-1900s, vegetation in many Sky Islands in Mexico has matured, land uses are now limited in many ranges, and vast areas of montane forest and woodland in the region are essentially de facto wilderness, especially at higher elevations.

Biodiversity in the Madrean Archipelago of Sonora, Mexico

Flowery rhetoric often gives birth to new terms that convey images and concepts, lead to inspiration and initiative. On the 1892-1894 expedition to resurvey the United States-Mexico boundary, Lieutenant David Dubose Gaillard described the Arizona-Sonora borderlands as “bare, jagged mountains rising out of the plains like islands from the sea” (Mearns 1907; Hunt and Anderson 2002). Later Galliard was the lead engineer on the Panama Canal construction project.

Documenting the Biodiversity of the Madrean Archipelago: An Analysis of a Virtual Flora and Fauna

The Madrean Archipelago Biodiversity Assessment (MABA) of Sky Island Alliance is an ambitious project to document the distributions of all species of animals and plants in the Madrean Archipelago, focusing particularly on northeastern Sonora and northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. The information is made available through MABA’s online database (madrean.org).

List of Sky Island names and elevations

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