Vegetation analysis: A graphical analysis of plant succession in desert communities affected by fire

The Mojave Desert is affected by fire every year. With each fire comes the removal of old growth and, in its place, new growth – consisting primarily of those species which thrive in disturbed areas. The focus of my research is to look at plant communities that have been disturbed by fire, and examine the successional pathway of these disturbed environments. The seven environments I analyzed were burned within the last twenty years and are found in the Coleogyne ramosissima ecotone throughout the Spring Mountain range near Las Vegas, Nevada. The data was collected with randomly chosen circle plots in the burned environments, as well as the neighboring unburned environments. There was no correlation found between the length of time since the fire and the level of diversity of the environment. However, the degree of evenness is higher in the burned environments as compared to the unburned environments. It appears that there was not enough time between the fires to see a difference in the composition of the community