The Sonoran Plant Atlas

Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas by Raymond M. Turner, Janice E. Bowers, and Tony L. Burgess, is an enlarged and fully-revised version of the original 1972 atlas. The book describes the taxonomy, geographic distribution, and ecology of 339 plants, most of them common and characteristic trees, shrubs, or succulents. Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas can be ordered from The University of Arizona Press.

You can download the raw data files used to create Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas. Each data file contains entries for one species in a fixed-width text format, and is named with the species code used in The Sonoran Plant Atlas project. In most cases, the species code is comprised of the first two letters each of the plant's genus and species. Links to the data files are organized alphabetically on the index pages in the menu to your left.

Codes and field positions used in the data files are explained on the Data File Explanation page. You can also download a listing of genus and species names with their associated codes in Microsoft Excel format (230 KB).

There are over 2,700 individual data files; a great number of these contain only a few data points and were not included in Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas.