I’ve been slowly compiling a dataset that I hope will eventually be useful for answering interesting questions about plant communities. This consists of a series of points, each with a list of plants observed at that site (usually within a 10m radius) and almost all with a landscape photograph as well. At present, I have about 725 of these. They are mostly from the following counties in New Mexico: Catron, Doña Ana, Luna, Otero, Sierra, and Socorro–basically the Las Cruces District of the BLM and USFS lands adjacent to it–but also includes various other locations as I happen to visit them. The points are not selected randomly, but aren’t selected according to any kind of systematic plan, either. Some are BLM or Jornada Experimental Range monitoring sites, some are the result of hiking through an area out of curiosity and stopping every 3/4 mile or so to take a photo and get a list of plants, some are sites where I have gone in search of particular plants, etc. Various subsets were chosen in clearly biased ways, but I figure these more or less cancel out overall since these biases are not consistent across subsets. For the moment, I will use these data in the simplest way to answer a general question: what are the common plants in this area? So, here we go, the most frequent 69 (for no particular reason) species from my lists, each followed by the raw number of sites at which it was observed:
1. Larrea tridentata, 299
2. Muhlenbergia porteri, 284
3. Dasyochloa pulchella, 238
4. Gutierrezia microcephala, 177
5. Acourtia nana, 176
6. Prosopis glandulosa, 169
7. Parthenium incanum, 166
8. Bahia absinthifolia, 158
9. Eriogonum abertianum, 157
10. Bouteloua eriopoda, 138
11. Flourensia cernua, 135
12. Pinus ponderosa, 134
13. Bouteloua gracilis, 126
14. Pleuraphis mutica, 124
15. Bouteloua barbata, 116
16. Pseudotsuga menziesii, 115
17. Aristida purpurea, 114
18. Salsola tragus, 109
19. Scleropogon brevifolius, 108
20. Quercus gambelii, 108
21. Cylindropuntia leptocaulis, 107
22. Aristida adscensionis, 101
23. Solanum elaeagnifolium, 92
24. Bouteloua curtipendula, 92
25. Achillea millefolium, 90
26. Enneapogon desvauxii, 88
27. Opuntia macrocentra, 88
28. Yucca elata, 85
29. Cylindropuntia imbricata, 82
30. Thymophylla acerosa, 82
31. Croton pottsii, 78
32. Opuntia phaeacantha, 77
33. Poa fendleriana, 73
34. Tidestromia lanuginosa, 71
35. Yucca baccata, 70
36. Ephedra trifurca, 68
37. Chenopodium incanum, 68
38. Chamaesaracha sordida, 67
39. Hoffmannseggia glauca, 66
40. Geranium caespitosum, 61
41. Zinnia acerosa, 59
42. Gutierrezia sarothrae, 58
43. Panicum hirticaule, 57
44. Sporobolus contractus, 56
45. Sporobolus cryptandrus, 54
46. Muhlenbergia arenacea, 54
47. Allionia incarnata, 54
48. Juniperus deppeana, 54
49. Pinus edulis, 52
50. Dysphania graveolens, 52
51. Amauriopsis dissecta, 51
52. Kallstroemia parviflora, 50
53. Verbesina encelioides, 50
54. Artemisia ludoviciana, 48
55. Thalictrum fendleri, 47
56. Koeleria macrantha, 47
57. Rhus microphylla, 47
58. Bouteloua aristidoides, 45
59. Dalea formosa, 45
60. Juniperus monosperma, 44
61. Chaetopappa ericoides, 44
62. Artemisia carruthii, 44
63. Menodora scabra, 43
64. Quercus grisea, 42
65. Sanvitalia abertii, 42
66. Boerhavia triquetra var. intermedia, 41
67. Setaria leucopila, 40
68. Koeberlinia spinosa, 40
69. Dasylirion wheeleri, 40
I’m not sure if there’s any take-home message here, except perhaps: if you want to know the flora of southwestern New Mexico, you might start with these. Or… if you see something written about the flora of southwestern New Mexico and it doesn’t include most or all of these, it is probably quite incomplete. If it includes something not on this list at high frequency, this is probably the result of either misidentification or coverage of a small and atypical subset of the vegetation of the area.