On a large scale, ecotones describe transitional landscapes that exist where two or more distinct landscapes converge. Forests that dominate the eastern United States, a land of abundant rainfall and humidity, must somehow become the arid Great Plains. Walking from Denver to D.C. you would encounter innumerable changes in the landscape, minor transitional places. About halfway through the journey you would cross though a much more significant transition zone wending from Minnesota south though Texas; a relatively thin band of scattered trees, predominantly oaks (Quercus sp.), outliers of the forest to the east, with an understory that mostly resembles the prairie to the immediate west. It is a landscape of borrowed parts combined to create something altogether different. This is the Midwestern oak savanna, a melding of prairie and forest.