Challenges, constraints, and realities in enhancing, creating, and restoring aquatic and terrestrial habitats for wildlife.

Authors: Heidi B. Blasius, Jeff Conn

Year: 2013 (xlv)

Abstract

The San Simon Valley, Graham County, Arizona, has been the focus of land management and conservation efforts since 1950, as it is a desertified and degraded environment needing extensive restoration. Prior to livestock grazing and other anthropogenic impacts, the valley once supported the San Simon Ciénega, a five mile long and a quarter mile wide wet valley bottom that straddled the New Mexico/Arizona border, the San Simon River, which flowed seasonally into the Gila River, and the associated bottomlands that once supported luxuriant sacaton and grama grasslands. To counter this trend of degradation and loss, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Safford Field Office (SFO), is enhancing and creating aquatic habitat for native fish species and restoring terrestrial habitat for resident and migratory wildlife in areas parallel to the San Simon channel with little to no multiple use conflict. To date, exclosure fences have been replaced, invasive salt cedar removed, aquatic habitat enhanced and created, and adjoining grasslands restored to protect aquatic habitats from excess runoff and erosion, to provide bank stabilization, facilitate sediment filtering, and stabilize areas of active erosion. As a result of lessons learned and challenges faced during these projects, the BLM and partners are working to expand and facilitate restoration on public and private lands by developing an ecoregion based native plant material program and establishing a series of workshops to demonstrate techniques to improve effectiveness and reduce project costs.