Use of remote sensing techniques to quantify border impacts at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Coronado National Memorial

Drake, Sam; Sanova, Nina; Hubbard, Andy; Mc Govern, Jeff

This report exams the possibility and feasibility of using remote sensing techniques to exam the effect that illegal border crossings are having on the natural areas. Parks located along the entire Mexico-United States border have experienced dramatic increases in illegal cross-border traffic in recent years with concomitant increases in law enforcement activities. As with other border parks, drug traffickers, law enforcement agencies, and illegal migrants typically utilize backcountry areas of our National Parks along the border (including designated wilderness) to avoid detection or to interdict illegal trafficking. A large portion of this traffic is on foot, but off-road driving is not uncommon in some individual park units, as shown at ORPI, where local wrecking companies routinely recover abandoned vehicles (though this should be occurring less frequently over time at ORPI and CORO due to the construction of vehicle barrier fences). The result of this traffic is a spider web of unofficial trails and roads replete with discarded water bottles, clothing, food, and other refuse. Until very recently, efforts to control illegal activities have focused largely on the apprehension of illegal migrants and illegal drug traffickers. Documentation and monitoring of resource impacts within National Parks have received very little attention outside of some individual park units. With the exception of one year of data that has been collected at ORPI (2001), none of the border parks have been successful in systematically collecting quantitative resource impact data appropriate to the scale on which impacts are known to be occurring. Such quantitative resource data are critical for designing and evaluating park resource management and protection in border parks, and could serve as the foundation for continued specific threat-based monitoring of illegal and law enforcement impacts in border parks. This knowledge gap is largely due to a lack of staffing and funding sufficient to adequately evaluate these impacts (although there are now a number of projects designed to help address this gap; see Future Directions in this report). In response to the increase in border-impacting activities, the NPS-Mexican Affairs Office provided in 2001 funding for the ORPI staff to conduct a preliminary survey in order to quantify the extent of illegal roads, trails, and trash. These data have been examined and a summary slide presentation was created that discusses the results of the survey and the effectiveness of standalone ground-based survey methodology.