Great Sandy-Tanami desert
The Great Sandy-Tanami desert is a World Wildlife Fund ecoregion of Western Australia extending into the Northern Territory.[1]
Contents
Location and description
This very large ecoregion consists of the Little Sandy Desert, Great Sandy Desert, and Tanami Desert Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia (IBRA) regions,.[2][3] The landscape is desert sands with areas of wooded steppe and shrubby grassland. The Great Sandy Desert is a large area of red desert sand dunes, while the Tanami Desert to the east is flat sand broken up with areas of hills. One prominent landmark in the region is the large sandstone rock Uluru. The climate is hot and dry and the area is mostly uninhabited.
Flora
The vegetation is very thin and consists of spinifex grass and saltbush shrubs that are adapted to the desert conditions. There are also occasional acacias and desert oaks.
Fauna
Much of the wildlife of this hot climate is nocturnal including the rabbit-sized marsupial the Bilby and the Rufous hare-wallabies of the Tanami Desert. The wildlife of these deserts includes communities of wild camels, descendants of animals brought here as transport in earlier times.
See also
References
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found., written by the World Wildlife Fund, from National Geographic magazine.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ IBRA Version 6.1 data
Further reading
- Thackway, R and I D Cresswell (1995) An interim biogeographic regionalisation for Australia : a framework for setting priorities in the National Reserves System Cooperative Program Version 4.0 Canberra : Australian Nature Conservation Agency, Reserve Systems Unit, 1995. ISBN 0-642-21371-2
External links
Media related to Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at Wikimedia Commons
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