Arizona Envirothon 2003 Other Web Links

The World Wide Web is a prolific source of information in this modern age. Most of the Web is not peer-reviewed, that is, read and checked by independent experts. Therefore, the web's information must be consumed with caution. It's always best to seek corroboration of information across multiple sources.

Here are several web sites that focus on the issues of Arizona forests and trees and on this year's Envirothon topic of Agricultural Land Conservation & Preservation. Many of these web sites link to yet more web sites. The last one listed here is about general forest ecotones in Arizona; don't miss it.

On-line guides to important trees of Arizona:

Note: You should be able to observe and describe tree specimens. Namely, describe the leaves (broad or needles, how long, how many needles per group), fruit (flowers or cones, scales, size), and bark (color, thickness, platy). The on-line guides below are better than nothing, but a good basic tree guide for this is the "Golden Guide to Trees of North America."

• Douglas-fir: A major species of Arizona's Rocky Mountain mixed conifer forests.
  
• White fir: A lesser, but still important species of Arizona's Rocky Mountain mixed conifer forests.
  
• Quaking aspen: The crowd favorite of Arizona's subalpine forests.
  
• Fremont cottonwood: A common deciduous hardwood along Arizona's natural streams (riparian corridors).
  
• Arizona sycamore: Another common deciduous hardwood along Arizona's natural streams.
  
• Alligator juniper: An aptly named conifer in Arizona's Madrean woodlands.
  
• Velvet mesquite: A dominant legume (nitrogen fixer) tree of the Sonoran desert.
  
• Arizona white oak: An evergreen oak of Arizona's Madrean woodlands.
  
• Gambel oak: A deciduous oak of Arizona's Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine forests.
  
• Ponderosa pine: The dominant species of Arizona's Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine forests, (what's left of that after the 2002 fire season).

Some Arizona Forest Ecology Sites

• Ecology of Southwestern Ponderosa Pine Forests: Cruise through this comprehensive page and focus on:
   
  1. Why ponderosa pine is so important in Arizona.
      
  2. The natural fire regime of ponderosa pine and how current fire patterns are different.
      
  3. Other disturbance ecologies of ponderosa pine forests.
      
• Southwestern Sky Island Ecosystems: This site details the biological diversity found in Arizona's so-called Sky Islands. Concentrate especially on the changing forest types with changing elevation, as illustrated in Figure 2.
  
• Biodiversity: What is this thing biodiversity and why do people worry about it? How might urban encroachment into Arizona forests compromise biodiversity? This web site is from the highly regarded American Museum of Natural History.
  
• Forest Fire Management in Arizona: Wildland fire is a dynamic process in Arizona's forests. Cruise this suite of web sites to learn about current and past fire patterns in Arizona and strategies and issues of restoring wildland fire to Arizona's forests. (Note: pdf files in this site are protected with a different password from the rest of this Arizona Envirothon site; check with Paul if you need the password.)
  
• Some basic plant ecology: Can you explain the grand carbon equation of life?
  
  
  
  1. Green plants (ag crops, trees, cactus, you name it) take this equation in both directions, right and left. In which direction would it be called photosynthesis?
      
  2. Do you particpate in this equation? If so, when? Which direction?
      

Conservation Easements: A strategy For Preserving Agriculture Lands

• Conservation easement an effective land preservation tool: An opinion piece in favor of conservation easements as a strategy for preserving agriculture lands.
   
• Conservation easements put money in the wrong pockets: Not so fast everybody—a dissenting view on the use of conservation easements to preserve agriculture lands.
   
• Farm Services Agency: A federal government agency helping to preserve farmland, though not necessarily for annual cropping purposes. Some state forestry agencies cooperate with this. In particular, click on the "Conservation Reserve Program" link.
   

Urban Sprawl

Urbanization of agriculture and wildlands often occurs simply as so-called "sprawl," where people or small communities move themselves out into open areas without much government oversight or regulations. How serious is this issue?

• Wildcat subdivisions fuel fight over sprawl: A High Country News article about sprawl in the Pima Country outpost called Picture Rocks. This kind of sprawl causes serious management ramifications.
   
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Water Use In Arizona

Check out this graphic showing the consumptive use of water relative to its natural renewability:

• On this map, the lighter the area, the more sustainable the water use, i.e., much less water is used than gets replaced each year. Conversely, the darker the area, the less sustainable the water use, i.e., in the darkest area more water is used that is gets renewed each year.
   
• Practically all of Arizona falls into the dubious distinction of using more water than gets renewed. This begs the question: Where does all the water go? Check out this pie chart, from the Arizona Department of Water Resources web site, and you'll see that agriculture "sucks" up the great majority of water in Arizona. These data are from 1994, but the relative water-use budget of Arizona probably has not changed much since then.
   

• To see the specific water-use budgets of different areas of Arizona, check out this web site, also from the Arizona Department of Water Resources web site. You'll see that agriculture is a dominant water use throughout the state, up to a whopping 81% of the water budget in Pinal County, which is predominantly farmland.
   
• The 2003 Envirothon issue of Agricultural Land Conservation & Preservation certainly implies the need to save agricultural lands, which is indisputedly a vital environmental issue across North America, if not the entire arable world. However, some would argue that Arizona and other semi- to hyper-arid regions really should not be engaging in what amounts to being non-native agriculture, simply because of the enormous amount of water that is used to grow crops here. Thus, in the state of Arizona, the issue of Agricultural Land Conservation & Preservation is not as straight forward as it is in other, more mesic areas, including for example Maryland, where this year's Canon Envirothon competition will take place.
   
• But if agriculture were removed from Arizona, what would be lost? Plenty. For example, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce lists some of the "fruits" of our land, including the total financial impact of agriculture on the Arizona state budget. The only questionable statement in this web site is that "Arizona has ... abundant water." This is true only in the sense that Arizona borrows water heavily from past time (i.e., Pleistocene accumulations of groundwater), which is not an infinitely sustainable strategy, and from other places (e.g., Colorado River runoff from the Rocky Mountains), which are having more and more claims made on them by other states every year.
   

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Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
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Copyright © 2003 Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona
Revised -- March, 2003
URL: http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/~sheppard/envirothon/2003otherweblinks.html