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SIERRA VISTA — The annual San Pedro River surface water mapping is getting extra help from across the border for a difficult project.
“It’s hard hiking. It’s deep sand and it’s quicksand … but there’s a lot of interest in studying the river,” said Holly Richter, the Upper San Pedro program director for The Nature Conservancy.
This year some of the interest is from workers from the Ajos-Bavispe National Forest and Wildlife Preserve in Mexico and a representative from Biodiversity and Harmonic Development (BiDA), a non-governmental conservation organization in Sonora, Mexico.
Representatives from each of the groups came to the San Pedro House on Friday to train for the June 21 wet and dry area mapping.
 Jim Mahoney, outdoor recreation planner for BLM, and Luis Portillo, a representative from the Ajos-Bavispe National Forest in Mexico, discuss the portion of the San Pedro River flow national forest workers and other volunteers will be mapping on June 21. (Laura Ory•Herald/Review) |
Volunteers and staff from the Bureau of Land Management and The Nature Conservancy have collected flow data for the San Pedro River each June since 1999.
About seven miles from the border and into Mexico has been mapped, but not on a consistent basis, Richter said
They hope that will change.
About 13 teams in the United States and five in Mexico will be walking along sections of the San Pedro River to record areas with significant surface water. Beavers also get “mapped” during the survey when they’re found, Richter said.
Jim Mahoney, outdoor recreation planner for BLM, helped translate and explain the mapping methodology and the “30-foot rule” for the Mexican participants.
With a clipboard, hand-held global positioning system, a flag to mark their starting point and even some netted hoods to keep insects from getting in the way of the survey, the teams will record the starting and ending points of river flow that extends 30 or more feet, with the GPS devices. That way the map only shows “wetted length,” Richter said.
Then they practiced pacing 30 feet, which is roughly nine steps, because the teams won’t have time to use tape measurers or other devices while walking their stretch of the river.
They eventually hope to map about 40 miles of the river from Los Fresnos, Mexico, from one of the river’s major tributaries up to the border, said Luis Portillo, a representative from the Ajos-Bavispe National Forest in Mexico.
“Wow. Es magnifico!” said Richter, meaning “That’s magnificent” in Spanish. The additional length would be a vast expansion of the data.
But the effort could take time, since they will need permission to cross boundaries that divide the river, similar to in the United States, Portillo said.
The San Pedro River is a priority conservation area in Mexico, and they wanted to learn the methods being used to track the river’s health, said Rosa Elena Jimenez Maldonado, a representative from the Ajos-Bavispe National Forest in Mexico.
Since the river flows north from Mexico, the Mexicans have a responsibility to help collaborate with groups in the United States to protect it, Richter said.
Last year about 51 percent of the section of river mapped in Mexico was wet, similar to the 52 percent in the Upper San Pedro area in Cochise County. Overall, the river was about 39 percent wet, Richter said.
After the mapping, the data collected by all the teams will be used to create a map showing where the wet and dry sections of the river are.
Of course, this year it also will be translated into Spanish, Richter said.
HERALD/REVIEW reporter Laura Ory can be reached at 515-4683 or by e-mail at laura.ory@svherald.com.
