The Desert

1. The Desert By: Wooseok Park Topic : desert Genre : fiction

2. Hot and dry desert A Hot and Dry Desert is, as you can tell from the name, hot and dry. Most Hot and Dry Deserts don't have very many plants. They do have some low down plants though. The only animals they have that can survive have the ability to burrow under ground. This is because they would not be able to live in the hot sun and heat. They only come out in the night when it is a little cooler.

3. Cold Desert A cold desert is a desert that has snow in the winter instead of just dropping a few degrees in temperature like they would in a Hot and Dry Desert. It never gets warm enough for plants to grow. Just maybe a few grasses and mosses. The animals in Cold Deserts also have to burrow but in this case to keep warm, not cool. That is why you might find some of the same animals here as you would in the Hot and Dry Deserts.

4. Grassland Grassland biomes are large, rolling terrains of grasses, flowers and herbs. Latitude, soil and local climates for the most part determine what kinds of plants grow in a particular grassland. A grassland is a region where the average annual precipitation is great enough to support grasses, and in some areas a few trees. The precipitation is so erratic that drought and fire prevent large forests from growing. Grasses can survive fires because they grow from the bottom instead of the top. Their stems can grow again after being burned off. The soil of most grasslands is also too thin and dry for trees to survive.

5. Tundra tundra is the coldest of all the biomes. Tundra comes from the Finnish word tunturi, meaning treeless plain. It is noted for its frost-molded landscapes, extremely low temperatures, little precipitation, poor nutrients, and short growing seasons. Dead organic material functions as a nutrient pool. The two major nutrients are nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen is created by biological fixation, and phosphorus is created by precipitation.

6. Taiga The taiga is the biome of the needle leaf forest. Living in the taiga is cold and lonely. Coldness and food shortages make things very difficult, mostly in the winter. Some of the animals in the taiga hibernate in the winter, some fly south if they can, while some just cooperate with the environment, which is very difficult.

7. Deciduous forests Deciduous forests can be found in the eastern half of North America, and the middle of Europe. There are many deciduous forests in Asia. Some of the major areas that they are in are southwest Russia, Japan, and eastern China. South America has two big areas of deciduous forests in southern Chile and Middle East coast of Paraguay. There are deciduous forests located in New Zealand, and southeastern Australia also.

8. Glossary • Hot Desert - any area in which few forms of life can exist because of lack of water, permanent frost, or absence of soil. • Cold Desert - are those arid areas where the only precipitation is in the form of snow and the ground is covered in ice year round. The largest cold deserts in the world are the polar areas.

9. Glossary • Grassland- an area, as a prairie, in which the natural vegetation consists largely of perennial grass, characteristic of subhumid and semiarid climates. • Tundra - one of the vast, nearly level, treeless plains of the arctic regions of Europe, Asia, and North America.

10. Glossary • Taiga - the coniferous evergreen forests of subarctic lands, covering vast areas of northern North America and Eurasia. • Deciduous forests - one of the vast, nearly level, treeless plains of the arctic regions of Europe, Asia, and North America.