Project Overview

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In September 2013 the Springs Stewardship Institute was awarded funding through the U.S. Department Of Interior's WaterSMART program for a two-year project to support the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative (DLCC).

The goal of this project was to provide land managers with comprehensive, current information about springs and springs-dependent species distribution across the U.S. areas of the Desert LCC in a secure, accessible, and user-friendly format that will allow for analysis of springs ecosystem vulnerability to land management practices and climate change.

The US area of the DLCC encompasses 217,145 square miles, extending into Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, California, Texas, and Utah. This complex landscape includes the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts and several mountain ranges. Large river systems, including the Gila, Rio Grande, Verde, San Pedro, and lower Colorado Rivers with thousands of springs: the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) geodatabases of the DLCC within the US includes 10,784 springs. Based on our experience, we expected that a compilation of additional data would yield thousands more. Our Springs Online database currently includes data for 13,675 springs.