干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Playas represent the only natural source of above-ground freshwater in the southern High Plains of North America; there are >20,000 such wetlands in the Panhandle of Texas (area of the highest. concentration of playas). Many organisms use these small, ephemeral ponds during some stage of then, life histories; e.g., dragonflies and damselflies (class Insecta, order Odonata, and suborders Anisoptera and Zygoptera, respectively) Of this Otherwise semi-arid region require these aquatic habitats for larval development. Relatively few distributional records have been established for Odonata ill this region, so we conducted a baseline survey to assess distributional patterns of odonates ill playas. Five seasons of observation and collection yielded important presence-absence data, resulting in 110 Country records for the 16 countries in the study area.