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Richard Davidson

Overgrazing and fire suppression have led to a loss of deep soils and vegetative cover in the 420,000 acre Alamosa Creek watershed in southwestern New Mexico. Rain and snow melt are no longer held by the soils and released slowly, but run off in floods, resulting in catastrophic flows and severe erosion that contribute sediment to Elephant Butte Dam. The diverse community of farmers that irrigate 800 acres of valley land on 49 farms in Cañada Alamosa are looking to revive traditional and develop innovate new practices to maintain their way of life. Partnerships are required to design new land management practices between scientists and local land managers. This project is a component of a larger Alamosa Land Institute...
Categories: Data, Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2012, Alamosa Creek, Cañada Alamosa Watershed, Conservation Design, Datasets/Database, All tags...
Final Report Abstract: More than half of the world’s population relies upon monsoonal rainfall that supports agriculture. While in many locations climate change is resulting in less moisture from fewer winter storms and more intense summer precipitation events, rural working landscapes (agricultural managed systems) are struggling to recover from increasingly extreme droughts and floods. The Cañada Alamosa watershed, a 420,000 acre in southwestern New Mexico (see figure 1), faces contemporary resource challenges common to the Southwest; overgrazing and fire suppression have led to a loss of deep soils and vegetative cover. This area’s traditional cultural practices of managed stormwater flooding of the historic...
Categories: Data; Types: Downloadable, Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service, Shapefile; Tags: 2012, Alamosa Creek, Cañada Alamosa Watershed, Conservation Design, Data.gov Desert LCC, All tags...
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