Odonata of Playas in the Southern High Plains, Texas

Abstract

Playas represent the only natural source of above-ground freshwater in the southern High Plains of North America; there are >20,000 such wetlands in the Panhandle of Texas (area of the highest concentration of playas). Many organisms use these small, ephemeral ponds during some stage of their life histories; e.g., dragonflies and damselflies (class Insecta, order Odonata, and suborders Anisoptera and Zygoptera, respectively) of this otherwise semi-arid region require these aquatic habitats for larval development. Relatively few distributional records have been established for Odonata in this region, so we conducted a baseline survey to assess distributional patterns of odonates in playas. Five seasons of observation and collection yielded important presence-absence data, resulting in 110 county records for the 16 counties in the study area.