Opuntia fragilis the others, rarely an inch in length: flowers greenish yellow, 1-1¼ inches wide: fruit ovate to subglobose. with few spines or bristles, mostly sterile, an inch or less long; seeds few and large. Rocky Mountain region from Canada to New Mexico. Opuntia fragilis Opuntia fragilis, known by the common names brittle pricklypear and little prickly pear, is a prickly pear cactus native to much of western North America as well as some eastern states such as Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan. It occurs in several Canadian provinces. It is known from farther north than any other cactus, occurring at as
Plant functional type Plant functional type Plant functional types (PFTs) is a system used by climatologists to classify plants according to their physical, phylogenetic and phenological characteristics as part of an overall effort to develop a vegetation model for use in land use studies and climate models. PFTs provide a finer level of modeling than biomes, which represent gross areas such as desert, savannah, deciduous forest. In creating a PFT model, areas as small as 1 km are modeled by defining the predominant plant type for that area, interpreted from satellite data or other means. For each plant functional type, a number of