Grasses

These grasses only grow and go to seed when there is water filling the pothole that serves them. The darkish soil is cryptobiotic crust, consisting of soil cyanobacteria, lichens and mosses. These play a critical soil holding ecological role in the arid and often windy Southwest. In the cold deserts of the Colorado Plateau region (parts of Utah, Arizona Colorado, and New Mexico), these crusts are extraordinarily well-developed, often representing over 70 percent of the living ground cover. Cryptobiotic crusts increase the stability of otherwise easily eroded soils, increase water infiltration in regions that receive little precipitation, and increase fertility in soils often limited in essential nutrients such as nitrogen and carbon. It's important that hikers not walk on these soils. It can take up to 50 years for them to regenerate.

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