Development of Vegetation and Climate in the Southwestern United States
Van Devender TR and Spaulding WG. 1979. Development of Vegetation and Climate in the Southwestern United States. Science. 204(4394):701-710
In the past 15 years, analysis of packrat (Neotoma spp.) middens has provided several hundred radiocarbon dated fossil plant assemblages from now arid and semiarid regions in the southwestern US...Many of the hundreds of plants in the fossil middens have been identified to species, allowing their distributions and autecologies to be used in paleoclimatic reconstructions. Fossil middens allow detailed paleoecological reconstructions of past communities in areas with few other sources of perishable organic materials. On the basis of the packrat midden record, we describe here the vegetational changes and inferred climates during the past 22,000 years in the warm desert of the southwestern US.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Van Devender, Thomas; Spaulding, W.
- Units
- ORPI , SODN
- Keywords
- Climate, Geology, Vegetation, Weather