The Transboundary Madrean Watersheds Landscape Conservation Design (LCD) was developed as part of an effort initiated by the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative (Desert LCC). The Desert LCC was a program of the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to address large-scale landscape conservation in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. This collaborative effort brought together managers, stakeholders, communities, and others to work toward sustaining resilient landscapes capable of responding to environmental challenges and supporting natural and cultural values for current and future generations. The Madrean Watersheds LCD area spans the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, and Chihuahua. It is characterized by isolated forested mountain “sky islands” surrounded by a “sea” of intervening grasslands and deserts. The landownership is a patchwork of protected and unprotected public and private lands. In total it covers approximately 22.7 million hectares (56.1 million acres) and over 65 individual Sky Island mountains in the U.S. and Mexico.A key component of a LCD design is the development and selection of indicators that can represent ecological and hydrological condition (and potentially trends when revisited at set intervals). Indicators provide a way for DLCC partners to rally around common objectives (e.g., biodiversity, connectivity, and socio-ecological services). Indicators provide an unbiased approach to prioritize where and (potentially) how to take conservation/restoration action. They may also be able to determine the effectiveness of partner’s on-the-ground management and conservation actions, at least at the large landscape scale. The goal of utilizing indicators for the Madrean LCD was to develop a spatially explicit set of ecological and socially relevant indicators to the Madrean LCD study area that has power to: 1) Spatially guide (prioritize) conservation/restoration within major watersheds; and 2) Detect changes in the primary ecosystems of the region, within and across watersheds, and to be useful and relevant to natural resource management/conservation goals of DLCC partner agencies and organizations.We chose HUC 12 sub-watersheds as our unit of analysis in order to facilitate conservation/restoration project placement prioritization within HUC 8 watersheds. We assessed this unit as a reasonable scale for spatially prioritizing on-the-ground actions, and a scale where we could capture common eco-hydrological, geological, and abiotic conditions (e.g., similar soils, run-off properties, aquifer depth, temperature profiles, etc.) in our analyses.We also chose to assess landscape condition, pattern, fragmentation, and trends for select ecosystems (forest and grassland) conditions within wildland block “cores”. These were GIS mapped (digitized) contiguous blocks of mostly unfragmented (no paved roads, limited development, etc.) montane “Sky Islands,” with forest ecosystem type communities (i.e., Madrean Evergreen Woodland, Petran Montane Conifer Forest from Brown and Lowe 1981) and large grassland areas (all cores >20 km2).This project was supported by the US Fish & Wildlife Service and the US Bureau of Reclamation.NO VALUE/NULLS ARE DENOTED BY -9999.
