Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Geography. There are three main deserts in California: the Mojave Desert, the Colorado Desert, and the Great Basin Desert.: 408 The Mojave Desert is bounded by the Tehachapi Mountains on the northwest, the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains on the south, and extends eastward to California's borders with Arizona and Nevada; it also forms portions of northwest Arizona.
The dry cold Great Basin desert of California consists of the Owens Valley, and is classified into Great Basin shrub steppe by the WWF, [4] and into the Central Basin and Range ecoregion by the EPA. [5] The deserts in California receive between 2 and 10 inches (51 and 254 mm) of rain per year. [6] Plants in these deserts are brush and scrub ...
Aridisols (or desert soils) are a soil order in USDA soil taxonomy. [1] Aridisols (from the Latin aridus, for "dry", and solum) form in an arid or semi-arid climate. Aridisols dominate the deserts and xeric shrublands, which occupy about one third of the Earth's land surface. Aridisols have a very low concentration of organic matter, reflecting ...
San Joaquin soil landscape. San Joaquin is an officially designated state insignia, the state soil of the U.S. state of California . The California Central Valley has more than 500,000 acres (2,000 km 2) of San Joaquin soils, named for the south end of that valley. This series is the oldest continuously recognized soil series within the state.
Caliche fossil forest on San Miguel Island, California. Caliche ( / kəˈliːtʃiː /) is a sedimentary rock, a hardened natural cement of calcium carbonate that binds other materials—such as gravel, sand, clay, and silt. It occurs worldwide, in aridisol and mollisol soil orders—generally in arid or semiarid regions, including in central ...
The ecology of the Sierra Nevada, located in the U.S. states of California and Nevada, is diverse and complex. The combination of climate, topography, moisture, and soils influences the distribution of ecological communities across an elevation gradient from 500 to 14,500 feet (200 to 4,400 m). Biotic zones range from scrub and chaparral ...
The Oaks 2040 survey estimates that 750,000 acres (3,000 km 2) of California oak woodlands are seriously threatened by 2040 as a burgeoning state population makes ever more use of the wildland. This comprehensive survey includes oak woodland maps and inventory data for the ten oak types found in California.
The most common engineering classification system for soils in North America is the Unified Soil Classification System (USCS). The USCS has three major classification groups: (1) coarse-grained soils (e.g. sands and gravels ); (2) fine-grained soils (e.g. silts and clays ); and (3) highly organic soils (referred to as "peat").