Mexico's Magic Circle: arid scrubland ecosystem
Welcome to Mexico’s largest ecosystem: Arid and Semi-arid Scrubland by John Pint This ecosystem is what you find if you enter Mexico through Mexicali or Ciudad Juarez. It's the Mexico of film, song, and cartoon: the hot, dry habitat of the Gila monster and the jumping cholla cactus. How is it possible that this same ecosystem is today the chosen home of thousands of Canadian and US expats? It's not so surprising. The northern extreme of the Arid and Semi-arid Scrubland includes the Sonoran Desert where a temperature of 52 degrees Centigrade (126° F) was recorded last June. But at the southern end of the system we find Mexico’s largest lake, Chapala, on whose shores the average temperature is about 21 degrees centigrade (70° F), which aligns with the standard "comfortable room temperature” in most parts of the world. Few of the 20,000 expats living on the shores of Lake Chapala would describe their neighborhood as” Semi-arid Scrubland,” despite what the geography books s...