Over the past century, winter minimum temperatures in the area have risen 10 to 15º Fahrenheit (6 to 8✬). In Saguaro National Park, scientists have long monitored the climate. The extremely slow-growing saguaro is particularly sensitive to temperature range and water abundance, and highly variable or extreme weather can stress the plants and limit reproduction. Under the right conditions, saguaro cacti can live to be 150 to 200 years old. Today, the area around the western district is dotted with neighborhoods (image credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. In 1933, Saguaro was established as a national monument. The western district formerly held 137 mining sites where copper, lead, silver, and molybdenum were mined from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. It is split into two sections: the eastern Rincon Mountain District, bordered by the Coronado National Forest, and the western Tucson Mountain District, which is shown in the closeup image.
The park covers about 145 square miles (37,000 hectares, corresponding to 370 km2) of the Sonoran Desert around Tucson, Arizona. Figure 1: Saguaro National Park, shown in these two natural-color images acquired on September 21, 2021, by the OLI instrument on Landsat-8, was founded to protect the iconic species.
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