Excerpt from Proceedings Pinyon-Juniper Conference: January 1987 Pinyon - juniper woodlands occupy over 47 million acres in the Western United States, primarily in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. Extensive stands also occur in California and Texas, and a few stands are in southern Idaho, southeastern Oregon, southern Wyoming, and the western tip of Oklahoma. The woodlands occur predominantly on foothills, low mountains, mesas. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This proceedings contains 50 papers including an overview of shrubland ecosystem dynamics in a changing environment and several papers each on vegetation dynamics, management concerns and options, and plant ecophysiology as well as an account of a Jornada Basin field trip. Contributions emphasize the impact of changing environmental conditions on vegetative composition especially in the Jornada Basin and Chihuahuan Desert but also in other parts of western North America and the world.

A hierarchical framework for the classification of Great Basin pinyon-juniper woodlands was based on a systematic sample of 426 stands from a random selection of 66 of the 110 mountain ranges in the region. That is, mountain ranges were randomly selected, but stands were systematically located on mountain ranges. The National Hierarchical Framework of Ecological Units (ECOMAP) was used for the highest levels of classification, subdividing the Great Basin into nine relatively environmentally homogeneous Sections. The remaining levels are vegetation-based, focusing on the relative composition and dominance of pinyon and juniper and the dominant shrub and perennial grass species present. This approach will allow managers to better relate the results of previous, as well as new studies and management experiences.