Today, climate change is compounding challenges that are affecting the health of new mexicos watersheds

Increasing temperatures are increasing intensities and durations of droughts, resulting in increased vegetation demand for water and reduced water availability for vegetation and grazing forage production. Less vegetation results in less infiltration, and increased runoff and flow energies. Increased stormflow, in turn, is associated with increased damaging and catastrophic floods that erode soils, transport sediment and other contaminants into river valleys, and reduce channel conveyance, increasing the risk of future floods. Land managers are asking for critically-needed progress in the best scientific assessments to inform their management. Traditional range restoration plans rely heavily on reseeding strategies among other strategies. Seeding alone has been shown to have high failure rates. Previous science has begun to characterize a familiar dynamic to land managers, that water-limited ecosystems, drylands, have strongly coupled dynamics between flood flows, vegetation, and grazing management. However, greater understanding is needed of the effects of restoration that integrates management of flood flows and vegetation that can optimize watershed functions of mitigating droughts and floods. The goal of this project is to better understand and quantify the impacts on vegetation restoration of water harvesting structures and strategic grazing management to promote revegetation and seedling regeneration that can ultimately reduce flooding, increase soil water retention, and increase resilience buffers to drought by maintaining moisture and organic matter on rangelands. The objectives of this project are: 1) a comprehensive and integrated restoration design and monitoring approach, and 2) a program to work closely with ranchers to develop and implement grazing and wildlife habitat management strategies that target watershed restoration effects. Our teams approach is to complement and leverage awarded watershed restoration projects in the hatch and mesilla valley region including: in the placitas arroyo watershed, the rincon subbasins 319 project, and the LA union watershed (figure 1). We employ a restoration strategy broadly known as water harvesting, which targets spreading, slowing, and retaining flood flows to support revegetation and includes practices such as stone lines and brush weirs. The projects focus on the current and potential flood flow pathways and dynamics on the landscape, e.g., floodplains and channels, and include monitoring and analysis of vegetation cover using remote sensing and hydrologic measures of flow. Expanding this analysis, our approach for objective 1 is to further assess the coupled vegetation and flood flow dynamics and identify key indicators that correlate with desired results. Our approach for objective 2 expands our analysis to the remainder of the watershed that is upstream of the concentrated flow paths. We will work closely with a range consultant and the ranchers in the watershed project areas to build trust through early piloting of grazing restoration strategies. Our team proposes additional expertise, assessments of this project, and the application of virtual fencing technology. A final output of relevant sections of a handbook will support integration of these approaches into daily management across the watershed. The intended beneficiaries of this approach are all those in the communities of this region that are impacted by improved watershed vegetation and by less flooding and sediment flowing into the valley. This also includes agency stakeholders such as BLM and those that collaborate in the stormwater coalition that have responsibilities to optimize the health of watersheds. The intended broader impact of this project is to respond to flooding and drought challenges caused by climate changes and land uses by working with communities to improve watershed health.