My report on Arizona oak savannas is now available

It has taken me a while, but I have finally finished my summary of our trip to southeastern Arizona savanna areas. This is primarily a photo show, with captions and a bit of explanatory text.

It was hard for me to believe how extensive the oak savanna areas were in southern Arizona. This is part of the state that features "sky islands", which are mountain ranges separated from each other by desert shrubland or grassland. All of these areas are relatively accessible by auto. Although we rented a four-wheel drive SUV, we could have reached most of the areas in a conventional auto. About 1/3 of the roads were good wide gravel and the rest were paved.

Most of these savannas are in the Coronado National Forest, a huge area in southern Arizona whose headquarters are in Tucson. Prescribed burning is carried out, but most of the burns we read about were wildfires, some of vast extent, generally caused by humans. Although the "culprit" is never caught, most people in the area assume that these fires are caused by illegal immigrants (the Mexican border is not far away). We saw Border Patrol vehicles everywhere, even on some of the remote gravel roads were traveled.

My report can be reached from this link, which is part of my web site on oak savanna restoration. The photos have all been edited in Photoshop so that the download time is relatively rapid. With a broadband connection, the whole report downloaded to my computer in about 10 seconds.

The photo below shows a typical area of open-grown Emory oaks at around 5000 altitude near Greaterville, Arizona. If you use Google Earth, you can search for this town and bring up a fairly high resolution air photo of the area.