White Fir

(Abies concolor)

Family: Pinaceae

Phylum: Coniferophyta

CSU TREE MAP ITEM #63

 

Distribution

This tree is native to the mountains of western North America from the southern Cascade range in Oregon, south throughout California and into the San Pedro de Mátir in northern Baja California; west through parts of southern Idaho, to Wyoming; and south throughout the Colorado Plateau and southern Rocky Mountains in Utah and Colorado, and into the isolated mountain ranges of southern Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico. It is popular as an ornamental landscaping tree and as a Christmas tree.

By Elbert L. Little, Jr., U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, and others - USGS Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center: Digital Representations of Tree Species Range Maps from "Atlas of United States Trees" by Elbert L. Little, Jr. (and other publications), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29251358

Needles

No machine-readable author provided. Wsiegmund assumed (based on copyright claims). [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Cones

Female Cones

By USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Herman, D.E. et al. 1996. North Dakota tree handbook. USDA NRCS ND State Soil Conservation Committee; NDSU Extension and Western Area Power Admin., Bismarck, ND. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Male Cones

By Agnieszka Kwiecień (Nova) - Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=756573

Questions

Using the bark descriptors given in the handout, describe the type of bark this tree has.

Based on your observations of all the trees, do the gymnosperms appear to have bark more similar to each other than to the angiosperms? Why or why not?