Lost Pines Forest Ecotone

Video Transcript

"My name is Kerry Russel. I have a Masters degree in landscape ecology and we're going to take a minute just to speak a little bit about forest ecology and the definition of an ecotone, as it relates to this area in central Texas, where we are right now. We just drove about thirty miles east of Austin, Texas. Now we're in Bastrop, in Bastrop State Park, which is also called the Lost Pines State Park. You can probably see behind me, there's a lot of pine trees that you would never ever see in Austin. Where we are right now is special because imagine that you have a landscape of central Texas that is kind of defined by the Edwards Plateau, which consists largely of these alkaline soils that come from limestone. So imagine inside that, that landscape, there is this area that is maybe a geologic uplift or deposition of different type of soil coming from the Colorado River, which is very nearby, and that is what has created this small patch. Imagine a patch inside, you know, a greater landscape that makes it different from what the rest of the landscape is. So an ecotone is what we say is when you have two ecosystems that butt up against one another, and there's a zone between the two of them that the two of them share, and within that zone, they're going to have a lot of shared characteristics that would not be present, you know, within what I'll call the purer forms of those ecosystems, or the definitive forms of those. So what you're seeing here is a little bit of central Texas, there's a little bit of east Texas, and they come together to form what's called the Lost Pines region of central Texas."