Selecting Prospective Sites for Future Riparian Areas in Arizona

Abstract

Within the desert areas of Arizona, riparian habitat attracts a diverse range of flora and fauna, concentrating their populations along the banks of streams and washes. Due to a variety of factors over the past century, these areas have degraded in size and quality, resulting in a loss of native vegetation and wildlife habitat. Ultimately, if this trend is to be reversed, one approach might be to create new, artificial riparian areas. To achieve that, suitable, non-riparian locations must first be identified for possible conversion into prospective riparian zones. Hence, the goal of this project is to perform a suitability analysis to locate tracts of land within Arizona which might be suitable for riparian conversion. Issues such as water rights, engineering, and funding are not covered in this paper. Several spatial criteria were identified as indicators for success, including land ownership, flooding potential, fire potential, length of streams/washes, proximity to human development and current habitat. Many geographic datasets were utilized to produce maps showing these locations, according to their ability to apply these criteria. Further, once these locations were identified, a historical analysis was performed to show the vegetative health of each area over time, as well as potential rainfall metrics, both of which provided detailed indicators of success. The results revealed several tracts of land in disparate areas which fulfilled all criteria and could be considered for Arizona riparian habitat conversion projects.