Photo By Mark Schauer | Home to a wide variety of animals, including the Sonoran pronghorn and one of the...... read more read more
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With more than 1,200 square miles of land area, U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) is the fourth-largest installation in the Department of Defense in terms of land area.
Testers see the proving ground as a natural laboratory, and thus have a vested interest in good environmental stewardship.
Home to a wide variety of animals, including the Sonoran pronghorn and one of the largest and most genetically diverse populations of bighorn sheep in Arizona, YPG helps sustain the creatures with 25 wildlife water drinkers situated across its mountains and desert range.
“These waters are some of the most phenomenal things we have for wildlife,” said Daniel Steward, wildlife biologist. “It allows animals to spread across the range and get full use of the habitat.”
The drinkers are a stabilizing presence in one of the nation’s driest desert regions, with mechanical apparatus to keep a steady supply of water available for wildlife. Mule deer, bobcats, coyotes, multiple bird species, even bees benefit from their presence.
“We have captured eagles on camera using those waters, lots of migratory birds, even quail,” said Steward. “Any kind of wildlife out there will use them.”
Wildlife officials are meticulous about keeping the drinkers a viable and perennial presence on the range. This past winter, YPG personnel joined up with the Arizona Department of Game and Fish and dozens of volunteers to upgrade the massive tanks that store water for drinkers at two locations: one saw work done in January, the other in March.
“A lot of our volunteers come from groups like the Yuma Valley Rod and Gun Club and the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society,” said Steward. “We had various folks affiliated with other outdoor groups and a group of students from the Cibola High School Future Farmers of America. We had volunteers from a lot of different walks of life.”
Both locations were in extremely remote and isolated areas of the range, requiring helicopters to bring in the people and materials necessary for the work. The more recently installed storage tanks across the range are made of PVC and filled by water runoff from the desert’s rare rain events. A steady rain event can fill the massive tanks, and they are situated with care near washes that will run, but not large ones that will run so violently that the tank fills with sediment instead of water. Experience has shown that rainwater has a lower saline level than water from local wells, which means less sediment buildup to foul water apparatus’ moving surfaces. At the site that saw work in January, the volunteers helped install a much larger tank that should eliminate the need to drive more than 90 minutes off-road hauling a 1,000-gallon water tank filled at the closest standpipe.
“It is an incredible feat of logistics to haul water that remotely,” said Steward. “The new system we put in at this site is 23,000 gallons, and we put the catchment in an area with a pretty good catch basin that should be able to fill it with a decent rain event. When it gets completely full, it should be able to stay full for a couple of years.”
At the site that saw work in March, volunteers laid and cemented piping to two 5,000-gallon PVC tanks and a smaller 2,500 gallon tank near a natural tenaja that can hold roughly 10,000 gallons of water depending on sediment levels. The volunteers used water from the tanks to mix the concrete on site, then toted it in buckets across the craggy mountainside. The tanks are UV-resistant and meant as a supplement to the water in the tenaja, which is stronger than a human-made drinker, but more prone to evaporation, and possible crisis for the wildlife that depend on them.
“The natural tenajas can go dry,” said Steward. “If they go dry, you’re putting a lot of wildlife at risk.”
In the past when they went dry, personnel hauled water in by helicopter, which is both time and resource intensive.
“Our hope is that we won’t have to helicopter water in to fill those tanks very often, if at all,” said Steward. “We can’t really predict the weather that well: all we can do is build resiliency.”
An important innovation for the drinkers in recent years was the addition of sensors to continuously monitor water levels. The sensors spare personnel from having to regularly travel to monitor water levels and allow for a rapid response if there is a sudden and catastrophic loss of water in one of the drinkers. The instrumentation accurately measures the daily water loss rate, which changes with the seasons and soaring desert temperatures. The two tanks worked on this winter now sport inexpensive, but state-of-the-art sensors for this purpose.
Though the proving ground is the nation’s largest artillery tester, it also encompasses the best preserved and protected Sonoran Desert landscape in the American Southwest. The healthy proliferation of a diversity of desert creatures under careful stewardship is, undoubtedly, one of the positive results of this.
“Our waters are doing really good right now,” said Steward. “We’re entering our driest time of the year for the desert—usually we don’t see rain again until July if we’re lucky. Only time will tell.”
| Date Taken: | 04.26.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 04.26.2023 13:25 |
| Story ID: | 443277 |
| Location: | YUMA PROVING GROUND, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 55 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Yuma winter sees wildlife water catchment improvements at YPG, by Mark Schauer, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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