Sally Trexler's Public Library

Chaparral is
characterized as being very hot and dry. As for the
temperature, the winter is very mild and is usually about 10
°C. Then there is the summer. It is so hot and dry at
40 °C that fires and droughts are very
common.

Savanna is grassland with scattered individual trees. Savannas of one sort or another cover almost half the surface of Africa (about five million square miles, generally central Africa) and large areas of Australia, South America, and India. Climate is the most important factor in creating a savanna. Savannas are always found in warm or hot climates where the annual rainfall is from about 50.8 to 127 cm (20-50 inches) per year. It is crucial that the rainfall is concentrated in six or eight months of the year, followed by a long period of drought when fires can occur. If the rain were well distributed throughout the year, many such areas would become tropical forest. Savannas which result from climatic conditions are called climatic savannas. Savannas that are caused by soil conditions and that are not entirely maintained by fire are called edaphic savannas. These can occur on hills or ridges where the soil is shallow, or in valleys where clay soils become waterlogged in wet weather. A third type of savanna, known as derived savanna, is the result of people clearing forest land for cultivation. Farmers fell a tract of forest, burn the dead trees, and plant crops in the ashes for as long as the soil remains fertile. Then, the field is abandoned and, although forest trees may recolonize, grass takes over on the bare ground (succession), becoming luxuriant enough to burn within a year or so. In Africa, a heavy concentration of elephants in protected parkland have created a savanna by eating leaves and twigs and breaking off the branches, smashing the trunks and stripping the bark of trees. Elephants can convert a dense woodland into an open grassland in a short period of time. Annual fires then maintain the area as a savanna.

As these tools become vital to helping community leaders ask and answer questions with both local and global implications, the ability to think spatially is an increasingly important skill for students. Hundreds of jobs--in such areas as planning, law enforcement, environmental management, business, public safety, health, and agriculture--now require key geographic inquiry skills.

The Revolution frequently divided families, sometimes
turning brother against brother or father against son,
but, as this letter indicates, the bonds of affection
between Timothy Jr. and Sr. were never broken. “When
I look back on past time, I regret our difference of
sentiment in great as well as (sometimes) in little
politics; as it was a deduction from the happiness otherwise
to have been enjoyed,” Timothy wrote his father.
“Yet you had always too much regard to freedom
in thinking & the rights of conscience to lay upon
me any injunctions which could interfere with my own
opinion of what was [inserted: my] duty…Often
have I thanked my Maker for the greatest blessing of
my life-your example & instructions in all the duties
I owe to God, and my neighbour.”

The 1803 Louisiana Purchase, an incredible deal made with France during Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president, doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson’s next step was to learn all about this new territory of the United States. He chose Meriwether Lewis, a former army captain and his own private secretary, to lead the expedition. It was Lewis’s job to pick a command partner and assemble the crew he thought would work the best. Lewis chose another army captain, William Clark, to join him and put together the team. Clark’s exceptional map-making skills proved invaluable, and he kept detailed records throughout the journey.