Identifies transportation infrastructure investments that may help leverage the economic potential of the study area and foster future land development. Describes the study area’s existing and future transportation conditions and presents transportation framework recommendations based on planning by Aztec Land & Cattle Company, the Town of Snowflake and Taylor, and Navajo County. It presents findings from case studies on inland ports and rural industrial developments and discusses possible funding sources and strategies for infrastructure investment.
Development of new water resources will be necessary to meet municipal, industrial, environmental, recreational, and other demands associated with expected growth in Arizona, United States, and Sonora, Mexico. Desalinated seawater from the Gulf of California is one possible solution.
This report examines how effectively Pima County’s natural open-space acquisitions have addressed priorities for conserving species’ habitats and landscape features identified in the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. The scope of this study is beyond the County's Multi-Species Conservation Plan, which is a subset of the overall Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan.
The purpose of this study is to provide the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service with an analysis that identifies anticipated impacts to each of the covered species and asks the question: How effectively will the County's mitigation lands include the specific habitats of covered species under the Multi-Species Conservation Plan?
Develops the methods for using the National Land Cover Dataset to report change by jurisdictions and land ownership by utilizing an existing dataset. Local GIS-based measures of development based on tax assessor records do not provide direct measures of habitat loss.
Swift Trail Parkway (State Route [SR] 366), an Arizona Scenic Byway, is in southeastern Arizona in Graham County ... The road begins outside Safford, at the base of Mount Graham, and continues up the mountain to Riggs Flat Lake ... Officially, the parkway's limits are milepost (MP) 116, 2.3 miles beyond the intersection of US 191 and SR 366, to MP 142. However ... the plan study area encompasses the remaining portion of road (5.8 miles) to the Riggs Flat Lake turnoff (Forest Road [FR] 287)
Chronicles how the intention to conserve a relic population of Gila topminnow under current resource conditions is generally insufficient. We have let the resource base degrade too far to expect project and site specific responses to stem losses, much less lead to recovery. The Gila topminnow was considered to be among the most common of fishes in the Santa Cruz River system in the early 1940s. Three decades later is was considered endangered; and in another three decades time, its recovery is not foreseeable, given the piecemeal approach to protection efforts.
If one species had to be chosen to preserve and restore, perhaps it should be cottonwood. Cottonwood-willow forests, where they exist and are healthy, indicated the presence of a viable riparian area, which is in turn the key to conserving great proportions of our native species. A reflection of the dire status of our riparian systems is that the Sonoran cottonwood-willow and Sonoran mesquite-cottonwood forests.