UGWA’s Forest Restoration Project in Sapillo Creek area is a model for successful partnerships. Working in partnership with Gila WoodNet, Gila Conservation Education Center, and Center for Biological Diversity, this project is addressing water quality problems in Sapillo Creek. 

Until the late 1800s, light grass fires every two to twenty years, along with competition from grasses, maintained a more open condition of old growth ponderosa pine forest scattered with lush glades filled with grasses, forbs and shrubs. Since then, fire suppression has effectively removed grasses and other herbaceous plants. A natural fire regime is now known to be critical for watershed quality and health. Restoring herbaceous ground cover is absolutely necessary for re-establishing a desirable grass fire regime and a healthy watershed in the ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest. As a result of the forest restoration thinning project, over time, the tree component of the plant community will be reduced and herbaceous vegetation will increase.

The benefits of the herbaceous vegetation to watershed health are numerous. It binds the soils together with fine roots, slows down the rate that rainwater flows over the land, and provides channels for water to penetrate the soil. Restoring herbaceous coverage will reduce soil erosion, increase water absorption rates, and supply more water and nutrients to the vegetation.

So, you might ask, why not just use prescribed fire to take care of thinning the trees and restoring the herbaceous ground cover?  Well, since dense thickets of small ponderosa pines have replaced the ground cover, forests may be too dense for safe application of prescribed fires.  In order to remove ground fuels and use fire as a thinning tool, a hot fire is needed. This presents an unacceptable catastrophic fire risk. Mechanical thinning is a much more sure and safe bet to reducing tree density. Then, when a prescribed broadcast burn is applied to the mechanically thinned area, it will be much more effective at helping to restore a natural fire regime and restore the herbaceous plant community. Particularly if during thinning, the main objective is to increase the amount of sunlight that reaches the forest floor in order to restore the herbaceous ground cover to the treatment area.

Reducing the tree density not only has an indirect benefit to the watershed but a direct benefit, too. The risk of a stand replacing fire is reduced, thereby preventing catastrophic fire’s disastrous results of large increases in sheet-type, gully and head-cut erosion and subsequent increases in sediment loads to Cow Creek and Sapillo Creek, and ultimately the Gila River.

So the major results of this project are two-fold – with one common desired effect. By restoring herbaceous coverage and by reducing the risk of a stand replacing fire in the project area, the project’s activities will reduce and prevent non-point source pollution to  Cow Creek and have long-term effects downstream on reducing sediment loads to Sapillo Creek.

To help UGWA measure the success of this 319 project, a comprehensive monitoring program is being developed for restoration activities in the Gila National Forest. This too is a collaborative effort with the Forest Service, Center for Biological Diversity, Gila Conservation Education Center, Gila WoodNet, UGWA and NMED. We will be able to compare how effective this project’s activities are at restoring herbaceous ground cover to areas that have burned, by both prescribed or natural fires, as well as compare it to conventionally thinned areas. Also, we’ll see how the soil movement on the project site compares to these other monitored areas to learn the degree of impact that these varying restoration activities have on soil stability and on reducing erosion. NMED’s Surface Water Quality stream monitoring and assessment will be used to inform the program as well.