Ancestors of dragonflies have been flying across the region we now call Grand Canyon for more than 300 million years. Odonata, the order to which dragonflies and damselflies belong, are among most widely recognized non-pestiferous insects. However, the Grand Canyon assemblage has not previously been described and presented to the public. In this book, long-time river runner Larry Stevens teams up with odonatologists Rich Bailowitz and Doug Danforth to provide a unique and superbly illustrated reference to the dragonflies and damselflies of the Grand Canyon region. This guidebook relates the evolutionary history and contemporary biodiversity of these fascinating creatures to the Canyon's spectacular geology and wide array of ecosystems.

The geology and biology of Grand Canyon are both vast in scope and deeply intertwined, but while the story of its rock is writ large, much of its highly diverse life is cryptic or, in the case of dragonflies, fast-moving and difficult to see. Therefore, it requires considerable effort to observe and understand life's particularity and spatial distribution in relation to the landscape. Over the past century, research by a committed group of scientists and naturalists has revealed much about the Canyon's plant life, fish, and birds, and has provided moderately good documentation of its other vertebrates. However, we have only just begun to plumb the depths of how the world's most famous large, deep canyon influences the myriad of invertebrate species that scuttle, blow, crawl, and zoom through its intimate crevices and gaping chasms, and how life persists here. Spectacular advances in scientific information over the past several decades provide ever-improving insights into relationships among the many species that live around us. Nonetheless, the literature on invertebrate biology remains primarily the domain of specialists and has not been made widely available to the public. Therefore, exploration, revelation, and outreach have been important activities for us to communicate to the public the richness of our natural biological heritage. Our aim here is to better understand and care for the beauty, complexity, and diversity of the varied life forms existing around us in this marvelous landscape and everywhere, and to provide a baseline for Grand Canyon against which to evaluate future biological changes. We hope this book conveys some of our appreciation of that beauty and sense of wonder.

Larry Stevens is an evolutionary ecologist and the Curator of Ecology at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, where he also serves as Director of MNA's Springs Stewardship Institute. Over the past half century he has studied the ecology of the world's most famous large deep canyon, and the river that carved it, working as a river guide and for the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, several colleges and universities, and Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. With a PhD in Zoology from Northern Arizona University in 1989, he has written many scientific and popular works about Grand Canyon. He is forever indebted to Jeri Ledbetter, who patiently edited and designed this book.