Intrabasin Floral Differences in the Sonoran Desert; a case study from the Casa Grande Valley
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Plant Science
- Keywords
- Casa Grande Mountains, ecosystem-wide variation, Sonoran Desert, flora differences, North Mountain Park, soil relationships, pH gradient, soil type, Arizona
- Copyright
- © 2014 Garcia et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Intrabasin Floral Differences in the Sonoran Desert; a case study from the Casa Grande Valley. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e207v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.207v3
Abstract
Background: The purpose of this study was to determine what floral differences exist in North Mountain Park and Casa Grande Mountain Park which are both located on opposite sides of the Casa Grande Valley, Pinal County, Arizona and to attempt to explain any measured differences. Previous authors have proposed several explanations for floral variation within the Sonoran Desert including elevation, soil pH, and mineral content. This study explicitly tests several of these proposed mechanisms for determining community composition. Methods: The floral composition was measured in both North Mountain Park and Casa Grande Mountain Park through a series of transects which were sampled by multiple times in 2012 and 2013. Elevation data soil pH were also sampled. Results: The data recovered from North Mountain Park differed from the expected values in Casa Grande Mountain Park by 22%. This indicates a significant difference in the flora between these two localities that was not predicted by earlier studies. Elevation and soil pH differences between sampled localities were not significant. This suggests that mineral composition of the soil may play an important role within this basin in determining community composition. Discussion: Many factors that have been proposed in prior studies do not appear to play a significant role within the Casa Grande Valley in determining community composition. This indicates that the composition of a community is influenced by different factors in different locations within the Sonoran Desert. This makes determining overall controlling factors across an ecosystem difficult.
Author Comment
This is a paper that my students (at a college prep high school) and myself have prepared. They are looking for feedback in order to improve the manuscript before submitting it to the peer-reviewed PeerJ.Version 2: Passive voice changed to active in several places, modified Figure 1 to better highlight field areas, cleaned up Results section.