Mojave Desrt Ecosystem Studies

Where Desert Meets City:

Vulnerability and Recoverability of the

Mojave Desert Ecosystem

The Mojave Desert Ecosystem can no longer be treated as a wasteland. Home to 6 military bases, 4 national park units, and considerable BLM land, its population has grown to over a million people, and 40 million people live within a convenient drive. Land managers, organized in several formal groups, are calling for unbiased scientific input to help them balance competing demands, from locating utility corridors and waste disposal sites to managing habitat for endangered species. Where Desert Meets City will provide support for land managers by developing maps and data bases describing vulnerability and recoverability of the land, and use these to identify methods that will monitor vital signs of ecosystem health.

The strategy is to help desert managers achieve their adaptive management objectives with a rigorous, scientific approach. Starting with baseline data, much of which has been assembled by the Department of Defense Legacy Program, local studies will aim at gaining a deeper understanding of how surface processes interact with the biota. A key is to examine natural and human-induced variations, both locally and across the region. This knowledge will be extrapolated to the ecosystem using remote sensing techniques. Maps of vulnerability and recoverability for specific stresses and types of damage will be created by testing hypotheses based on knowledge of these fundamental processes and then developing geographic information system methods to derive multiple maps. A monitoring strategy will be designed so that land management agencies can detect significant changes in key indicators of ecosystem health on a continuing basis as part of their adaptive management program.

Interdisciplinary work will proceed on all elements of the project concurrently, with increased understanding of processes from local studies contributing towards regional assessments and regional studies highlighting anomalies needing more intensive study. Throughout, regular contact with land managing clients will keep the study focused and ensure that good science helps to develop good policy.

Text and illustrations of full proposal

Page constructed 3/13/97, last modified 30 July 1997
The URL of this page is: <http://geology.wr.usgs.gov/MojaveEco/summary.html>
Created by Dave Miller (dmiller@isdmnl.wr.usgs.gov)