>>2448619Badlands can be a desert feature so long as they are actually semi-arid or arid (>50% annual precipitation to PET is the minimum basic definition for a semi-arid or arid climate), there are also badland features in humid climates as well. In the 1800s the entire great plains was called the great desert simply because it lacked trees and was massive in area. The problem with this view is that semi-arid climates can support massive forests as well (chaparral, pine-oak forests, and AZ-NM forests which cover a combined area of 75,000 sq miles which ranges from humid climate to semi-arid climate in both states), thus a more accurate description of a desert is one that includes both topography, flora, and climate considerations. Another example is that many people call the volcanic scrublands of the Big Island of Hawaii a "desert" when most of it actually receives as much rainfall as the east coast of the US and is just devoid of vegetation because of volcanic activity and poor soils. Topographic variations of semi-arid climates can include steppes (grasslands), savanna (grasslands with dispersed trees), dry or seasonally wet forests (chaparral, pine-oak forests etc), table lands (flat plateau like expanses with little grass and very few trees), badlands (hilly and eroded terrain in often similar settings as steppes or table lands) etc.
Peveril Meigs set the arbitrary definition that arid lands have less than 10 inches of precipitation annually and semi-arid lands have between 10-20 inches of precipitation annually and if they were grasslands they were steppes. When in reality his definition did not even consider PET values or topography and as such sub-polar and polar deserts along with many rainy season deserts (parts of the Sonoran desert, Afghanistan/Pakistan/India etc) slip through his definition.
tl:dr - Common definitions of deserts are flawed and self contradicting. Pic related gets 18" of rainfall and is considered part of the Sonoran desert.
