A Mississippi River Wetland National Park?

http://www.osu.edu/news/newsitem3123

Tamarix ramosissima survey on White Sands National Monument

White Sands National Monument is located in the Tularosa Basin and surrounded by White Sands Missile Range, the site of the first atomic bomb test. The area is desolate and remote and still used for target practice. The dunes are composed of gypsum, a salt that accumulates in the dry lakes and playas of this closed basin.

From White Sands National Monument

Our Mission: Vegetation mapping plus Search & Destroy Tamarix ramosissima AKA Russian Salt Cedar. Our goal was to ground-truth vegetation maps and locate populations of this invasive species for possible future air strikes.

From White Sands National Monument

Cottonwoods grow in the dunes because of the shallow water table.

From White Sands National Monument

We traveled by sand buggy.

From White Sands National Monument

From White Sands National Monument

Many dunes are stabalized by Rhus Trilobata (Skunkbush Sumac), Poliomentha (Rosemary Mint Bush), Chrysothamnus (Rabbitbrush, Chamisa), and Yucca.

From White Sands National Monument

Tamarix ramosissima visible in the background. The foreground is covered by a thick salt crust.

Buffel Grass Removal at Saguaro National Park

Before:

After:

Buffel Grass is an invasive species that threatens to choke and burn out the Saguaro cactus and Sonoran Desert ecosystem. It looks somewhat like fountain grass, which is also a noxious invasive in our area:


For more photos, click here.

Great Sand Dunes National Park

In Colorado, the elemental forces of the desert and mountains meet: wind, dominant in the scoured aridlands, here locked in struggle with the water of the alpine mountains. There is a line above which precipitation outweighs evaporation and it is from these lands that all rivers flow.

(click here to view more photos)

Wind picks up the sand and deposits it in a crook of the mountains arrayed about, who in turn let down the flow of the headwaters of the Rio Grande, great snake that cuts through a thousand miles of canyonlands to reach the Sea. The flow smooths the land incessantly like an overprotective mother.

Here is my high water mark, from whence I, too, will flow back to the desert. I have found the headwaters.