HR: 0800h
AN: B41B-0113    [Abstracts]
TI: The Construction of Scrub in California and the Mediterranean Borderlands: Climatic and Edaphic Climax Mosaic or Anthropogenic Artifact?
AU: * Rodrigue, C M
EM: rodrigue@csulb.edu
AF: Department of Geography, California State University, Long Beach, CA 90840-1101 United States
AB: There is a marked difference in the representation of Mediterranean scrub vegetation (e.g., chaparral, maquis) in North American and European literature in biogeography and ecology. Authors discussing this vegetation in the California context accept that it is a natural response to the Mediterranean climates, with their late summer and fall fires, and steep terrain. Debate here focusses on the extent to which humans have modified or, indeed, can modify "natural" fire regimes. European authors frame this vegetation instead as a secondary successional formation in a landscape that "should" be dominated by oak woodland and forest. The widespread presence of Mediterranean scrub is cast as an artifact of human disturbance over thousands of years, mediated through overgrazing, deforestation, accelerated erosion, and anthropogenic fire. This poster will present a content analysis of the Mediterranean scrub literature, in order to engage both traditions in the construction of a unified framework for these pyrogenic formations.
DE: 9335 Europe
DE: 9350 North America
DE: 4815 Ecosystems, structure and dynamics
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting