Restoration in New
The Uplands
Ken Smith – Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute and Susan Rich – NM Forestry Division, Forest and Watershed Health Office
P
rofessionals working in the field of natural resource management have embraced the concept of using a watershed-scale approach to restoration since the days of John Wesley Powell. The state of New Mexico officially endorsed that management strategy in 2005 when it adopted the first statewide Forest and Watershed Health Plan in the nation. The authors of the plan envisioned ecosystems characterized by integrity and resilience, with healthy watersheds and forestlands that could support local economies and provide sustainable resources and amenities for generations to come.
It may be less important to restore a watershed to a particular condition or point in time than to nudge it towards the maximum attainable state of resiliency. For the scientists who contributed to this effort, the concept of a landscape approach is the logical conclusion of years of research and practice. To policy makers, however, this strategy presents special challenges, since political and jurisdictional borders are seldom aligned with watershed boundaries. Landscape-scale restoration requires an uncommon degree of collaboration and interjurisdictional coordination supported by broad political will. A reality where decisions are made and actions are taken on a watershed basis can only occur at the intersection of sound science and forward-thinking policy. The goal of the New Mexico Plan is to restore forests and watersheds at the 30 • March/April 2009 • Southwest Hydrology
landscape scale to a healthy, functioning condition. Watershed health is defined by the component ecosystems’ ability to survive and recover from disturbances within their historical range of variability. The limits of that range are being stretched, however, as human pressures increase and the impacts of climate change are beginning to be felt across the Southwest. Therefore, it may be less important to restore a watershed to a particular condition or point in time than to nudge it toward the maximum attainable state of resiliency. That calls for manipulating the “raw material”—the conditions on the ground as they are today—in a way that maximizes biodiversity, increases the ability of the biotic components to adapt to changing conditions, and manages the abiotic components to withstand the more extreme conditions that will likely prevail in the future.
San Juan Mountains
Albuquerque
Bosque Del Apache
Pelona Mountains
The Uplands Upland forests and woodlands in New Mexico cover approximately 19 million acres and can be categorized into four general zones: high-altitude sprucefir forests (covering 500,000 acres), mixed conifer/aspen forests (2 million acres), ponderosa pine/oak forests (5 million acres), and the widespread pinyon-juniper woodlands and savannas (11 million acres) (see map). These forests are typically found at the upper elevations of watersheds, so natural disturbances or management activities could eventually impact the ecosystems and water users at lower altitudes.
Las Cruces
SW REGAP Land Cover Forest Type spruce - fir (500,000 acres) mixed conifer & aspen (2 million acres) ponderosa pine/oak (5 million acres) pinyon - juniper (11 million acres)` riparian
Goals and Guidelines “Restoration” means different things to different people, and it is frequently used to describe forest treatments that strive to make an ecosystem more resilient to see Uplands, page 32
USGS National Gap Analysis Program. 2004. Provisional Digital Land cover Map for the Southwestern United States. Version 1.0. RS/GIS Labratory, College of Natural Resources, Utah State University
Uplands, continued from page 30
disturbances such as fire, climate change, or some type of anthropogenic activity. Getting the scientists and land managers to generally agree what a “state of resiliency” looks like on the ground, and helping the public understand the manipulations that are used to achieve these goals, are key factors to realizing progress in watershed restoration. Common goals in upland restoration include reducing the risk of uncharacteristically hot fires, increasing soil moisture and water yield, reducing erosion, protecting water quality, and increasing overall system biodiversity. Current approaches to upland forest restoration in the Southwest are linked to predevelopment forest conditions (before Europeans arrived in North America), the reintroduction of natural disturbance processes (such as fire) to forested watersheds, and the restoration of habitat needed for critical species such as the northern goshawk. Upland restoration treatments, although slightly different among their approaches, strive to make forests more resilient to ecosystem stressors such as drought, insect attack, or fire. They are also intended to protect water supplies by reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in areas not historically subject to this type of disturbance. Although clear restoration guidelines have been developed for upland watersheds dominated by ponderosa
32 • March/April 2009 • Southwest Hydrology
pines, other upland forests do not have specific standards for managers to follow. In ponderosa pine-dominated forests, restoration approaches include recreating meadows, clumping trees, and creating vertical and horizontal heterogeneity across these forests. In higher-altitude mixed-conifer forests, there is general agreement on the need to create a diversity of age classes, promote aspen regeneration, and reintroduce fire at varying intensities across the landscape, But the complexities of planning for roads, wildlife protection, smoke management, and visual aesthetics present special challenges to practitioners. In these highland forests, the impacts of restoration on sublimation and water infiltration are also important to consider. For the widespread and variable pinyon-juniper woodlands and savannas, there is active debate about the historical role of fire, the expansion of juniper into grasslands, and the effects of juniper on groundwater recharge. Although thousands of acres of pinyon-juniper woodlands are managed in New Mexico each year, no overarching guidelines for treatment exist for this forest type and managers tend to use site-specific prescriptions based on landowner objectives such as increasing forage or reducing fuels.
Assess Before Acting Before implementing treatments in watersheds, an assessment of the current
and historical conditions of the area is essential. This assessment often includes an inventory of the current vegetation (condition of natives, diversity and composition, presence or absence of non-natives/invasive species), wildlife, soils, the condition of the riparian corridors, and the quality and quantity of water moving through and off the site. An understanding of historical land use information and vegetation density and composition is also valuable. An excellent example of collaborative and comprehensive pretreatment monitoring is the Sacramento Mountains Hydrogeology Study being conducted at the Coleman Ranch near Cloudcroft, led by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources in cooperation with multiple partners across the state. The project is testing the effects of tree thinning on surface water and groundwater quantity and quality. In-depth pretreatment measurements will be compared to a thorough post-treatment examination of the effects of thinning.
Thinking—and Acting—Big Because of the diverse land ownership patterns in the Southwest, a major challenge is designing watershed restoration projects using the ecological boundaries that are the most meaningful on a landscape scale. Fortunately, land and natural resource managers are now discussing project prioritization on a
watershed basis. A recent example of landscape-scale coordination is the project planning by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the New Mexico State Land Office, the New Mexico Forestry Division, New Mexico Game and Fish Department, and private landowners to implement forest and grassland treatments (burning and thinning) over thousands of acres in the Pelona Mountain region near Datil. If passed by Congress, the Forest Landscape Restoration Act, championed by U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, would provide funding for land managers to implement treatments with a minimum project area of 50,000 acres. Combined with regional efforts to address constraints to large-scale treatments in our forests, such as small-diameter wood utilization, these new multijurisdictional and watershed-based planning initiatives are positive developments that will lead to improved forest and watershed health in our upland systems. Contact Susan Rich at
[email protected] or Ken Smith at
[email protected].
Floodplains, continued from page 31
Add in information on current land ownership and use, constraints on water and land management, and opportunities to address important community issues along these rivers, and a landscape-level view of the system begins to emerge. Once this information is available at the landscape scale, manageable ecological river subdivisions can be defined for further assessment. Trend analyses, models, and other tools that predict land-use changes, plant establishment, growth and succession, and groundwater and surface-water supply can be used to identify opportunities for adapting or restoring floodplain forest health. This analysis can inform strategies for riparian forest improvement, such as adapting plant communities to drier conditions at some sites or determining river-process requirements to promote resiliency of riparian species at others. Any landscape-level look at opportunities for upland and riparian forest sustainability and watershed health becomes a daunting
task in the face of numerous stakeholders and contentious issues associated with water and land in New Mexico. Many individual agencies struggle to address complex watershed issues at multiple scales. Getting the scientific community and land and water managers to analyze and describe the resiliency potential or adaptation requirements of our rivers is the first step toward coordinated management. At the same time, increasing public knowledge and appreciation about the need for large-scale projects that move us towards the goals of sustainable and healthy riparian forests and watersheds is needed. Both of these steps, recently initiated in New Mexico, will be critical to successfully implementing agreedupon strategies and fine-tuning our ability to adaptively manage a long-term program. Contact Gina Dello Russo at
[email protected].
Reference Shafroth, P.B., V.B. Beauchamp, M.K. Briggs, K. Lair, M.L. Scott, and A.A. Sher, 2008. Planning riparian restoration in the context of Tamarix control in Western North America, Restoration Ecology, 16: 97-112.
March/April 2009 • Southwest Hydrology • 33
