Sunday, June 2, 2019

Texas ecoregions

Ecoregions of Texas in much detail. Click on the image to embiggen.

Source for image
For what it is worth, many people find savannahs to be pleasant places to live. Savannahs are created by frequent fires killing off invading trees and favoring grasses, forbes and a few, select, fire-resistant tree species (usually oak).

Savannah offers firewood, shade, mast, grazing and decent soils. They are open enough so there is some breeze in the summer time.

Post Oak range
Live Oak range
Native Pecan range. I think I would be very happy in the middle and western part of the Texas pecan range or the eastern parts of the Oklahoma pecan range.

I was amazed at how exactly the precipitation slopes from east-to-west. For scale, Eaton Rapids, Michigan averages about 30" of rain a year.
The other part of the rainfall story is the evaprotranspiration potential. Basically, that is how much water would evaporate out of a shallow cake pan over the course of the day. The image shown above is for a single day in 2007 but it gives you a feel for the range you will run into...0.20" per day in the east and 0.40" per day of evaporation in the west.

3 comments:

  1. Hopefully you did not get all 30" last night. I saw the radar said you folks were going to get hammered. We are just north enough we got rain, just the dark green radar feedback, not the reds and yellows headed your way.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Charlotte lost power. The high winds went north of us but we got very heavy rain.

      Delete
  2. Whenever I bring people to my part of Texas for the first time, they are always flabbergasted by how lush and green it is. I have both Post Oak and Live Oak motts, and we typically get over 40" of precip. in a year. My in-laws are from the Caribbean, and on their first trip here they were expecting to see John Ford - John Wayne country. In old westerns, Texas towns like Liberty were portrayed as dusty desert refuges - in reality, Liberty is in the East Texas thicket, where you can sometimes cut the air with a knife, it's so humid.

    ReplyDelete

Readers who are willing to comment make this a better blog. Civil dialog is a valuable thing.