Changing Plant Life of La Frontera: Observations on Vegetation in the United States/Mexico Borderlands

Originating in a symposium on ‘Vegetation and Flora of La Frontera’ held at the American Institute of Biological Sciences to honour the late Forrest Shreve, pioneer desert ecologist, this collaboration of outstanding biologists, environmentalists, and climatologists from both sides of La Frontera presents a new agenda for study of the strikingly diverse shrub and grassland ecosystems of the US/Mexico border. The twenty-two contributors focus their expertise on historic cross-border changes in vegetation stemming from disparate land-use practices in the United States/Mexico border region – La Frontera – a 100-km-wide strip on either side of the international boundary. The diversity of scientific approaches includes fire histories, pollen studies, repeat aerial and ground photographic analyses, botanical surveys, biogeography, and paleoecology, to name a few. This book is richly illustrated with Landstat images, repeat ground photography, vegetation and reference maps, landscape photographs, and numerous graphs and diagrams.