The region has been badly degraded, mainly due to grazing. Safford and Benson in Arizona are located in low elevations of the western edges of the Chihuahuan Desert, but in an ecotone with the Sonoran Desert.Īccording to the World Wide Fund for Nature the Chihuahuan Desert may be the most biologically diverse desert in the world as measured by species richness or endemism. Alamogordo, Alpine, Benson, Carlsbad, Carrizozo, Deming, Fort Stockton, Fort Sumner, Las Cruces, Marfa, Pecos, Roswell, and Willcox are among the other communities in this ecoregion. There are few urban areas within the desert: the largest is Ciudad Juárez with almost two million inhabitants Chihuahua, Saltillo, and Torreón and the US cities of El Paso and Albuquerque. The lower elevations of the Sandia–Manzano Mountains, the Magdalena–San Mateo Mountains, and the Gila Region partly border the Chihuahuan Desert and partly border other ecoregions that are not deserts.
These create " sky islands" of cooler, wetter, climates adjacent to, or within the desert, and such elevated areas have both coniferous and broadleaf woodlands, including forests along drainages and favored exposures. There are several larger mountain ranges in the Chihuahan Desert, including the Sierra Madre, the Sierra del Carmen, the Organ Mountains, the Franklin Mountains, the Sacramento Mountains, the Chisos Mountains, the Guadalupe Mountains, and the Davis Mountains. The terrain mainly consists of basins broken by numerous small mountain ranges. The desert is fairly young, existing for only 8000 years. With an area of about 501,896 km 2 (193,783 sq mi), it is the largest desert in North America. Its largest, continual expanse is located in Mexico, covering a large portion of the state of Chihuahua, along with portions of Coahuila, north-eastern Durango, the extreme northern part of Zacatecas, and small western portions of Nuevo León.
It is bordered on the west by the Sonoran Desert, the Colorado Plateau, and the extensive Sierra Madre Occidental range, along with northwestern lowlands of the Sierra Madre Oriental range. It occupies much of far West Texas, the middle to lower Rio Grande Valley and the lower Pecos Valley in New Mexico, and a portion of southeastern Arizona, as well as the central and northern portions of the Mexican Plateau. The Chihuahuan Desert ( Spanish: Desierto de Chihuahua, Desierto Chihuahuense) is a desert ecoregion designation covering parts of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States.
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