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chaparral
Chaparral is a shrubland or heathland plant community found primarily in the U.S. state of California and in the northern portion of the Baja California Peninsula, Mexico. It is shaped by a Mediterranean climate (mild, wet winters and hot dry summers) and wildfire, featuring summer-drought-tolerant plants with hard sclerophyllous evergreen leaves, as contrasted with the associated soft-leaved, drought-deciduous, scrub community of coastal sage scrub, found below the chaparral biome. Chaparral covers 5 percent of the state of California, and associated Mediterranean shrubland an additional 3.5 percent.〔()〕 The name comes from the Spanish word for scrub oak, ''chaparro''.
==Introduction==
In its natural state, chaparral is characterized by infrequent fires, with intervals ranging between 10–15 years to over a hundred years. Mature chaparral (stands that have been allowed greater intervals between fires) is characterized by nearly impenetrable, dense thickets (except the more open chaparral of the desert). These plants are highly flammable. They grow as woody shrubs with hard and small leaves, are non-leaf-dropping (non-deciduous), and are drought-tolerant. After the first rains following a fire, the landscape is dominated by soft-leaved non-woody annual plants, known as fire followers, which die back with the summer dry period.
Similar plant communities are found in the four other Mediterranean climate regions around the world, including the Mediterranean Basin (where it is known as maquis), central Chile (where it is called matorral), the South African Cape Region (known there as fynbos), and in Western and Southern Australia (as kwongan). According to the California Academy of Sciences, Mediterranean shrubland contains more than 20 percent of the world's plant diversity.〔 The word ''chaparral'' is a loan word from Spanish ''chaparro'', meaning both "small" and "dwarf" evergreen oak, which itself comes from the Basque word ''txapar'', with exactly the same meaning.
Conservation International and other conservation organizations consider the chaparral to be a biodiversity hotspot - a biological community with a large number of different species - that is under threat by human activity.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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