Photo By Mark Schauer | Yuma Proving Ground's Environmental Sciences Division celebrated Earth Day by helping...... read more read more
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As a natural laboratory for testing virtually every piece of equipment in the U.S. Army’s ground combat arsenal, every day is Earth Day at Yuma Proving Ground (YPG).
To perform its vital mission for the warfighter, YPG has a vested interest in responsible ecological stewardship of its portion of North America’s most biologically diverse desert.
YPG is home to a vast array of wildlife, including Sonoran pronghorn, desert tortoises and one of Arizona’s healthiest populations of bighorn sheep. More than a hundred unique bird species pass through or call YPG home.
“YPG is a natural laboratory,” said Daniel Steward, YPG wildlife biologist. “We need healthy native vegetation out here for our testing, our training, and our wildlife.”
In 2022, YPG’s Environmental Sciences Division began a pilot project to plant native species of plants and trees around populated areas of post and sustain the saplings without irrigation systems. Toward this end, workers have planted the saplings using water boxes, which are three-gallon lidded polyurethane buckets that slowly wick water onto the plant’s roots over the course of months and are refilled by rainwater or condensation. Planting saplings in vertical shafts in the center of the devices also shields them from the intense heat of the desert floor until they grow hardier.
“We’ve done a lot of experimentation with water boxes so we can grow trees without the need to come in and irrigate later,” said Steward. “It’s not practical for us to haul a water trailer out to water things over and over. We’re doing things with dirt berms so it will naturally catch the water behind the plant.”
On the Thursday before Earth Day, the Environmental Sciences Division set up shop in the cafeteria at Price School, teaching two groups of kindergarten through fifth grade students about seed biology and helping them plant the seeds in individual plastic pots decorated with construction paper and crayons by each student. The next step for plants that successfully sprout will be re-potting them in the Environmental Science Division’s still-evolving plant nursery.
“We try to gather local seeds from this hardened desert environment,” said Steward. “Anything we can get the kids to germinate out for us, we’d like to put in the ground somewhere, whether it is on the cantonment area or out on the range.”
Though this winter was wetter than normal, sometimes the local desert goes the better part of a year without any rain at all.
“We’ve seen some really incredible eruptions of plants we haven’t seen in a long time,” said Steward. “We did a survey downrange this week: we counted 16 plants last year, and 143 this year. It’s exciting to see that ebb and flow of the desert, and when you get a good green year, it helps get a lot of seeds for the seed bank.”
At present, the nursery boasts scores of trees that are ready to plant now, and a few hundred more in various stages of nurturing to prepare them for the intense desert environment.
“We’ve gotten native soil from YPG and potting soil that has a lot of the nutrients for the saplings to get larger,” said Joshua Lightner, natural resources specialist. “Larger plants with a more mature root have a much better chance of survival downrange.”
Some of the more mature trees that were cultivated in the nursery have already been planted.
“We just started using them in a levy project downrange,” said Lightner. “We’ve planted some mesquites as part of the habitat improvement there for mule deer and pronghorn.”
The Environmental Sciences Division hopes to foster even more involvement in the nursery in the future.
“One of the things I would like to do once we have the facility completed is to open this up to volunteers and have a community garden,” said Steward. “We’ll have to have a volunteer champion who can be out every week to accomplish that.”
| Date Taken: | 04.18.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 04.18.2024 18:41 |
| Story ID: | 468899 |
| Location: | YUMA PROVING GROUND, AZ, US |
| Web Views: | 81 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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