Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
The Spanish And Mexican Baseline Of California Tree And Shrubland Distributions Since The Late 18th Century, Richard A. Minnich, Brett R. Goforth, Richard Minnich
The Spanish And Mexican Baseline Of California Tree And Shrubland Distributions Since The Late 18th Century, Richard A. Minnich, Brett R. Goforth, Richard Minnich
Aliso: A Journal of Systematic and Floristic Botany
Historical distributions of 31 tree species, chaparral, and coastal sage scrub described by Spanish land explorers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (1769–1806) and in land grant diseños (1784–1846) are reconstructed at 634 localities across central and southern California. This baseline predates most formal botanical surveys by nearly a century, allowing for assessment of vegetation change over the broadest time frame for comparison with pre-historical evidences and future distributions. Spanish accounts are compared with historical sources in the Mexican era (1821–1848), American settlement (1848–1929), and modern range maps of the 1929–1934 Vegetation Type Map (VTM) survey. Among tree …