Love Where You Live Series: Serpentines Surprising Sidetrips with John Roth

The Klamath-Siskiyous has over ten times more serpentine soils and rocks per acre than virtually any other bioregion on Earth. This presentation will explore how and perhaps why this happened and how serpentine helps preserve dense seafloors on less dense land, thus widening continents. The abundance of serpentine here, its rarity elsewhere, serpentine's extension of northern range limits, and the fairly even coverage of different types of serpentine rocks also results in low extinction and/or high speciation and migration rates. Finally, how climate change impacts all these processes, generally at the expense of serpentine biodiversity, will be discussed