Cross Timbers
ecoregion in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas
The term Cross Timbers, also known as Ecoregion 29, Central Oklahoma/Texas Plains, is used to describe a strip of land in the United States that runs from southeastern Kansas across Central Oklahoma to Central Texas. Made up of a mix of prairie, savanna, and woodland, it forms part of the boundary between the more heavily forested eastern country and the almost treeless Great Plains, and also marks the western habitat limit of many mammals and insects.
No major metropolitan areas lie wholly within the Cross Timbers, although roughly the western half of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex does, including the cities of Fort Worth, Denton, Arlington, and Weatherford. The western suburbs of the Tulsa metropolitan area and the northeastern suburbs of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area also lie within this area. The main highways that cross the region are I-35 and I-35W going north to south (although they tend to skirt the Cross Timbers' eastern fringe south of Fort Worth), and both I-40 and I-44 going east to west. Numerous U.S. Highways also cross the area. I-35 means a portion of Austin and Travis County is also included in the Cross Timbers.
As an ecoregion
The Cross Timbers are defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as Ecoregion 29, a Level III ecoregion. Some organizations and maps refer to the Cross Timbers ecoregion as the Central Oklahoma/Texas Plains. The Cross Timbers are contained within the WWF central forest-grasslands transition ecoregion.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cross Timbers” is ecoregion in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cross, Timbers and ecoregion, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “ecoregion in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3003780.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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- Expand the search: follow Cross Timbers primary sources, Cross Timbers archive and Cross research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Cross Timbers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.