Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

Say the word desert, and –and an image of a bleak and lifeless place may come to mind. That may be true for some deserts – but it’s not true for the Chihuahuan Desert Region.

07—It’s one of the most diverse places for both plants and animals in this country, and frankly, in the world.

That’s not including tropical and subtropical regions, of course. Cynthia Griffin is Executive Director of the
Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, or CDRI, in Fort Davis…located within the 220-thousand acre ecosystem.

29—There are over 3-thousand plant species on the Chihuahuan; it is a center of diversity for cacti. Our cactus greenhouse has some of the most rare and best examples of cactus found in the Chihuahuan Desert. There are more reptiles on the Chihuahuan than there are on the Sonoran. There are more birds on this desert [region] than in the Everglades. And in the Davis Mountains, we have 16 of the 18 species of North American Hummingbirds.

The Chihuahuan Desert Region has an elevation range from 1-thousand to 10 thousand feet above sea level, and it is isolated from other North American deserts.

10—So there’s not the bleeding over. And, so because it’s large, and because of its range of elevation, you will find species here that you will not find anywhere else.

Learning about deserts isn’t as dry as you once thought.

Find out more about the Chihuahuan Desert Region in the Aug/Sept issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2014 at 12:00 am and is filed under Conservation, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.