Revegetation and Monitoring the Cactus Forest Loop Road Saguaro National Park

O'Brien, Kara

The Cactus Forest Loop Road Revegetation and Monitoring is comprised of several components. The first component was scouting the area for future impact and identifying vegetation that would damaged or destroyed. Saguaro cacti to be impacted were removed and immediately transplanted in another area. Other cacti were salvaged, potted, and held over for transplanting post-construction. Some grasses and woody seedlings were also salvaged. Seeds, previous collected from the area were grown out at the Plant Material Center in Tucson. RECON Environmental Inc. was contracted to do the post-construction revegetation. Revegetation was conducted between January and March 2007. Thereafter, Park assumed responsibility of maintaining and monitoring the sites and individual plants. There are a total of 104 revegetation sites with 1562 plants, dispersed over 8 miles, most of which is one-way. Maintenance includes hand watering the transplanted plants, by far the biggest challenge, exotic plant removal, and removing the herbivory cages. An estimated 38 trees were removed during the project and to mitigate the loss of cactus ferruginous pygmy owl habitat, 260 mesquite and palo verde trees were planted. In addition, survivorship of all plants was recorded after one year. Post-construction long-term monitoring (2 years) monitoring assures the survival of the trees but provides us the opportunity to learn what species do well and what species are best suited for the different sites. As of January 2008, the overall survival rate is 85.6% and 64.6% for trees. Together the activities of revegetation and maintaining the plants should result in the successful restoration of the disturbed sites, but long-term recovery in arid-environments can take decades.