The Great Basin Desert is the largest U. S. desert, covering 190,000 square miles. It is bordered by the Sierra Nevada Range on the west and the Rocky Mountains on the east, the Columbia Plateau to the north and the Mojave and Sonoran deserts to the south. The Great Basin Desert, unlike the Mojave or Sonora deserts, characteristically "lacks Creosote Bush" and was defined for the purposes of a 1986 report by J. Robert Macey who distinguished "Great Basin Scrub desert" versus "Creosote Bush desert". Rainfall within the Great Basin Desert region varies from 7 - 12 inches of rainfall per annum, and includes several arid basins without Larrea tridentata (chaparral) such as the "Chalfant, Hammil, Benton and Queen valleys", as well as all but a southeast portion of the Owens Valley. Conversely, the "Panamint, Saline, and Eureka valleys" contain Creosote Bush, versus the Deep Springs Valley which contains Great Basin Scrub desert.
The Great Basin Desert is a cold desert caused by the rain shadow effect of the Sierra Nevada to the west. The predominant flora are "continuous shadscale and…sagebrush".
The ecotone demarcating the north of the Mojave Desert is the edge of Creosote Bush habitat and is also the south demarcation of the Great Basin shrub steppe and Central Basin and Range ecoregions. The ecotone is established by elevation increase, temperature decrease at higher elevations, and rainfall (less rain shadow at higher latitudes).
For the list of valleys with Salt Desert and Tonopah Playa ecoregions, see Central Basin and Range ecoregion.Famous quotes containing the word desert:
“Or were I in the wildest waste,
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,
The desert were a Paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there.”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)