Habitat is another word for a living thing's home or natural environment. If you live in the Phoenix Valley, your habitat is the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran Desert is pretty big (about 100,000 square miles), but you can also look for organisms in smaller places called microhabitats.
We usually focus on the Sonoran Desert, but today we are excited to learn about the other three deserts found in Arizona. Stay tuned to hear more about our four Arizona deserts, what defines a desert, and why deserts are important.
Why are flowers so pretty? Why do they smell nice? They're trying to attract pollinators! We can thank pollinators for almost all of the plants we see and eat.
All great scientists carry a field notebook with them to write down the cool stuff they find so they can remember it later.
Maybe Luke and Nicole are a little biased because they both have pet cats, but they think our Sonoran Desert felines are amazing!
You know about our daytime desert pollinators--bees, birds, butterflies--but did you know we have secret nighttime pollinators as well?
By Nicole Kallman, Education Manager2020 has certainly been a year of change and innovation. The pandemic beginning in March put our teachers and students in an unprecedented and challenging situation, working to navigate virtual classrooms amidst the social and economic impact of COVID-19. Despite these challenges, teachers rose to the occasion, working closely with parents
By Nicole Kallman, Education Manager, McDowell Sonoran ConservancyWhen most of us think about ecosystems, we think of the relationships between plants and animals. But the most fundamental relationship in any ecosystem is between the environment and everything that lives there. As the environment changes, whatever lives there must adapt to the changes or be replaced
By Marianne Moore, Ph.D., Arizona State University assistant professor Originally published in the Fall 2017 Edition of Mountain Lines Around Valentine’s Day 2007, a phone call from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to my Ph.D. advisor at Boston University, Dr. Tom Kunz, alerted us to unusual bat mortality occurring in New York
By Debbie Langenfeld, McDowell Sonoran Conservancy Parson's Field Institute certified citizen scientist Originally published in the Fall 2017 issue of Mountain Lines Photos by Dwight Keller. It’s a hot summer night and the bats in the Dixie Mine wait for sunset to leave their cavern for their nightly excursion in search of an evening meal.
