Measuring Success at Other Sites...
Now, some of the other sites. Dougway Proving Ground, this is what we
did. We set this up--we actually have five years of post-disturbance
data at Dougway Proving Ground. Some of the other sites we set up
later because as we got into this, they would say, 'why don't you add
Fort Bliss.' As a result, we don't have quite as many years on some of
these other sites. This is the San Rafael swell, a very scenic place to
go. It's like a little Grand Canyon. You go out there and there is
nobody else. We have a spectacular microbiotic crust in this site (right).
It's a pedestal type of crust. We didn't set up burning plots here
because there's not enough vascular plant cover to carry a fire in these
areas. We thought if it is not part of the natural disturbance cycle,
we're not going to artificially apply it. We're just going to look at
trampling here.
This is down in Fort Bliss, which is in the Chawawan desert in New
Mexico (on the New Mexico/Texas border area near El Paso). This track
right here is a tank track. They have tracks going through and really
doing some damage. We would set up plots out here in this undisturbed
area. They also had an area they set up where they were going to burn
an area. We said, oh, we'd love to get some plots in there. So we went
in and put in a pre-burn sampling kind of thing and when the range fire
occurred, it didn't burn where our plots were. So we had to move our
plots over. That's the way range fires work, they're very dramatic.
This is the crust at Fort Bliss. I know it's again another type of
morthology. It looks quite different. This is a lichen crust primarily
and it's a very different lichen. It's a dramatic carpon species. A
significant thing to note about this is this lichen does not have a
cynobacterium so this is not going to fix nitrogen. So maybe the role
of the crust in the Fort Bliss area is much different.
This is our toughest customer. This is in Yuma. Yuma is really hot,
really dry with very sandy soil. There wasn't really any crust even in
evidence when we went there. When we take a sample and put it in water
it would green up so there are signs of bacteria here but this is a
pretty extreme environment to try any kind of restoration methodology.
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