Restorations in Progress

Healing a Dysfunctional Watershed, New Mexico

Restoring an Extinct Marsh, Nevada

NEW!
Restoring a Desert Meadow

Sustaining Navajo Pastoralism

Restoring a Desert Meadow

The Cedar Mountain Rangeland Restoration

Bare dirt is plentiful in the area which the Cedar Mountain Project is intended to restore.

EcoResults! has something to celebrate! Recently, we received a generous grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) to restore 100 acres of degraded rangeland in central Nevada to meadow and grassland. The project will use cattle to restore those lands to health in the same way as two success stories on our web site: “Revegetating Mined-out Lands” and “From Mine Waste to Grassland” (see www.ecoresults.org). The new project is called the "Cedar Mountain Rangeland Restoration," and it is on land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. We'll be working with Tony and Jerrie Tipton on this restoration, and, judging from their past record, we expect outstanding results. The NFWF grant will cover costs of hay and its application, water truck, fencing materials, seed, and documentation by EcoResults!. We already have $72,500 of in-kind challenge funds pledged in the form of labor, equipment, water, fencing labor, cattle use, and intensive monitoring studies.

All we need to bring this project to completion, (in addition to some really hard work) is $8,000 to complete coverage of the matching funds requirement of the grant. If you can provide any or part of those $8,000, your investment in a healthier environment and a more sustainable rural community in the American West will be leveraged by a factor of twenty times. And you’ll be able to watch your contribution make the world a greener, more vital, more diverse place via our internet site. We should get some really good pictures of this one.

In this 1997 photo of an area near the Cedar Mountain Project site, a trial “treatment” by the Tiptons is in progress. Notice the dry, gray soil and lack of plant cover where the animals are standing.

You’ll also be able to take satisfaction from the fact that your contribution will be helping to make the point that diverse peoples, in this case environmentalists and ranchers, can work together and both get what they want, which in this case is a greener, healthier land.

The importance of the "Cedar Mountain Rangeland Restoration," is huge. First of all it will:

• Transform 100 acres of badly eroded and gullied rangeland now covered with only about 50 lb of vegetation per acre into valuable wildlife habitat. That habitat will be covered with 800 to 1000 lb of vegetation per acre that is more diverse and supports a greater diversity of wildlife species than nearby untreated areas.

• Provide a means for water to more easily infiltrate the soil (via the more plentiful plant stems and roots). That will make more water available to the ecosystem and create an impact similar to what an increase in rainfall would create. By slowing runoff the increased plant cover will also reduce the amount of topsoil and nutrients lost via erosion and reduce gullying. The impact of the cattle will also round and smooth the gullies hastening the above effects.

• The project will provide a “keystone” area to benefit wildlife in a larger area of about 1000 acres. The Tiptons’ intend to expand this keystone by means of grazing techniques similar to those used to create it.

This is the same place as illustrated in the previous photo a year later in 1998. Most of the ground is now covered with grass and other plants. This shows the kind of success we hope to create with The Cedar Mountain Project in the early stages of growth.

• In addition to the results this project will achieve on the ground it will serve as an eye-opening example to help make the point that rural people, using adaptations of agricultural techniques they are uniquely skilled and equipped to perform, can be an effective means of restoring and sustaining health to ecosystems, especially those that are severely degraded. (See www.ecoresults.org for examples)

• By being the first really large EcoResults! project, the Cedar Mountain Project can help confirm the validity of the principle that EcoResults! was created to establish—that those of us who want healthy ecosystems can actually get them by rewarding rural stewards for producing them. • The success of this project will likely inspire more rural land managers to undertake similar ecosystem restorations and thus add another means of social and economic support to ranches and farms in the West. That will reduce the number of those operations that have to go out of business and make their open space available to development.

• Last, but not least, this project will strike a blow for sanity in an insane world. It will help establish the fact that working together is an effective, efficient way to get the results we want. If you support our mission, we urge you to contribute.

Sign me up to support this Restoration in Progress!

Related Success Stories

Revegetating Mined-out Lands, Nevada

Other Restorations in Progress

Healing a Dysfunctional Watershed, New Mexico
Restoring an Extinct Marsh, Nevada
Sustaining Navajo Pastoralism