Active Projects
My currently active projects are focused on the San Pedro River.
San Pedro River, Arizona
Here's a view of the cottonwood trees along the San Pedro River at the Three Links Farm, north of Benson, Arizona. This place is important to me because it is the first river I have had a hand in resuscitating.
The Nature Conservancy bought this farm partly because of computer modeling work that I did for them starting in 1996, in order to retire the irrigation pumping and let the river flow again without interference from heavy irrigation pumping.
The river flows year round now that the pumps are out of the ground, and we hope that the flow will continue to increase and benefit several miles of the river downstream as well.
I am planning a drive out there this weekend, to take some pictures of the rusty old irrigation pumps stacked up in the shed, and give the kids a chance to mess around with driving a stick shift - super farm roads to drive on.
Really nice place to go for a hike in the river. Look at depth to groundwater maps of the farm in July (north half, south half) and March (north half, south half) in 2003
prolonging the life of the san pedro
Here I am hunched over madly taking measurements of groundwater drawdown in this irrigation well at the Three Links Farm in June. Measurements from this well, and from three others that were equipped with computerized measuring systems, give me some ground truth about how water moves around underground in the aquifer. Read the test report.
The cottonwood trees in the previous picture were close to this well, and the groundwater levels actually responded to the trees using water during the heat of the day. Wow, it was hot!
This work is part of my ongoing work with the Nature Conservancy to figure out how to restore and prolong the life of the lower San Pedro River. It would be a shame to let this river dry up the way the Santa Cruz River in Tucson has.
aerial view: san pedro river & benson narrows
A good bird's eye view of the places where the first two pics were taken. This is the place where civilization stops - south of here are the growing desert towns of Pomerene, Benson, Huachuca City, Sierra Vista, and the Army garrison at Fort Huachuca.
Quite a lot of attention is focused on the precarious water supply for these towns, and the choices we face about how much we value the San Pedro River near these towns.
The work I am doing at the moment is to help figure out if the groundwater mining that sustains the communities to the south of here is likely to have an adverse impact on the hydrology of the San Pedro River and the Three Links Farm to the north.
It is imperative to know now if we will face the same choices even for this comparatively wild stretch of the river, because it takes many years to undo the damage to a river dried out from groundwater mining.
Science informs the water policy makers, if they choose to listen.