This book concerns similar topics to those discussed in “The Natural History of City Creek Canyon Year.” If you liked “City Creek”, you may also enjoy this book:
Book Review: A Natural History of the Intermountain West
Waring, G. L. (2011). A Natural History of the Intermountain West: Its Ecological and Evolutionary Story. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Northern Utah readers and tourists who plan to explore the region find this book and Trimble’s “Sagebrush Ocean” essential reading.
Ecologist Dr. Gwendolyn L. Waring has written one of the classics of Intermountain West ecology. With an ecologist’s insight, she reviews how the geologic formation of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau formed a uniquely diverse environment. For example, as the Colorado Plateau rose and eroded rock layers, the region’s highly variable seasons husbanded the highest diversity of endemic vascular plants (141) and fishes (34) in North America. In contrast, during what was a geologic flicker, the great glacial melt lakes of the Great Basin such as Lake Bonneville, wiped out species and caused a low diversity in northern and central Utah. As the land of the Great Basin fell and the region warmed, relic Ice Age species became marooned on mountain ranges divided by basins of deserts. In response to the post-Ice Age warming climate, along with the Basin’s unique combination of stressors – low water, scorching summers and freezing winters – grasses and shrubs plants exploited polyploidy – having multiple copies of DNA strands – to evolve completely new pathways of carbon metabolism (C4). The plants new metabolism allowed them to more efficiently breathe while using less salt-contaminated water (128-130 – grasses, 137-142 – salt brush, sagebrush). Higher, cooler and wetter foothill and mountain lands favor less efficient C3 plants; lower hot summer basins favor C4 plants.
Repeatedly her writing emphasizes connections and patterns that long-time Basin residents might miss. Mountain trout – who once like salmon roamed the shallow inland ocean that was Utah – live in higher parts of mountain streams because the rocks erode less and water is clearer, but downstream sedimentary rocks cloud the water and favor chubs and suckers (34-43). This pattern is repeated in the large scale structure of the Colorado River system. Engelmann spruce, Limber (white) pines, and Ponderosa pines battle for space depending on water availability. The high montane pine forests burn on a natural cycle of 150-250 years and groves of water loving aspen act as natural fire breaks to prevent the spread of fire. Pine trees co-evolved to make their seeds attractive to nuthatches, who stockpile large caches of seeds each winter and allow forests to regenerate after 100 year destructive fires. Penstemons first evolved in the Intermountain West before spreading across North American. The region’s 70 penstemon species have short tubular flowers that perfectly fit the diameter of a bee. In contrast, the spurs of columbines restrict pollination to long-beaked hummingbirds and the long-tongued hawkmoths (159-161). Her book omits the evolution of the northern Great Basin’s hybrid Gambel’s oak forest, but this understandably due to her Arizona residency. With expert understanding she clearly constructs the pre-European condition of the Intermountain West’s various sub regions, how modern humans have changed it, and the current state of science on how these lands might change in response to increased carbon dioxide and warming.
Similar to another Intermountain natural history classic – Steven Trimble’s 1989 “The sagebrush ocean: a natural history of the Great Basin” – Waring’s book is organized by biological sub-region: high western mountains, lower ponderosa pine forests, pinyon-juniper forests, grasslands, shrub lands of basin bottoms, and water systems that connect them. Although Waring writes in a readable and at time poetic style of a naturalist, her book discusses about 700 scholarly books and journal articles between Trimble’s 1989 work and 2011. For example, the title of her chapter on the northern and central Great Basin valley bottoms of Utah and Nevada is titled “The Spare and Beautiful Cold Desert” – not the way the most people driving between Salt Lake City and Reno would view shrub lands. Her “Natural History” is an invaluable compendium of biological and ecological research work during that period.
Salt Lake’s Marriott Library and the Salt Lake City Library both hold one copy each, but the book can be ordered in hardcopy only through Abebooks or Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Intermountain-West-Evolutionary/dp/160781028X
