by Natalie Johnson

In Neolithic times, Middle Eastern people were among the first to cultivate plants and domesticate animals. After 4,000 B.C., the Sumerians of the Tigris and Euphrates river valley scribed the first written language on clay tablets. With uncanny precision, the Egyptians built the pyramids, starting in 2,700 B.C.

"Arid lands are the birthplace of many ancient civilizations from Babylonia and Judea to Persia and northern China," says Curtis Monger, a soil scientist with NMSU's Agricultural Experiment Station.

"Our clock, calendar and mathematics all go back to civilizations in arid regions in the Near and Middle East. Once there was a surplus of food with the beginning of agriculture, people could spend time doing other things like creating crafts and art, writing poetry and developing governments."

Lay of the land: The southern Doña Ana Mountains provide a dramatic backdrop for the Chihuahuan Desert with its signature creosote bushes.

Innovation has flourished under dry conditions in arid and semiarid lands. Today, in the Chihuahuan Desert surrounding NMSU's College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, history is repeating.

As the world's population increases, people are moving into and demanding more of these fragile lands. Agricultural and life scientists have gathered to find novel ways to cope.

"New times bring new demands on the land," says Kris Havstad, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Jornada Experimental Range. "With every 1 percent increase in population, there's a 10 to 20 percent increase in land use."

The sheer abundance of arid lands, located in such diverse countries as Australia, northern Africa, Iceland, India, Mexico and the United States, shows their worldwide importance. As the most prevalent land type, they cover one-third of Earth's land surface. In New Mexico alone, arid lands spread over 8 million acres.

Scientists around the world are concerned about the short- and long-term effects of a decline in vegetation and soil quality in arid lands. Grasslands are being replaced with desert shrubs-a process known as desertification.

"Desertification can be caused by environmental changes like a decline in rainfall or an increase in temperature, overgrazing, or even the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which gives desert shrubs a competitive advantage over grasses," Monger explains.

Whatever the cause, the results can be devastating for the land and the people who live on it. "This happened to a very profound extent around the Mediterranean," Monger says. "The Roman Empire, which was farming northern Africa, lost many of its productive agricultural lands due to desertification."

In New Mexico, as throughout the world, the pressure on resources in arid lands is increasing, says James Fisher, interim head of NMSU's agronomy and horticulture department. "We need to understand how to use our resources judiciously," he says.

Water is a resource of particular concern in arid lands as growing communities compete with agriculture for water, says Gary Cunningham, NMSU's vice president for research.

"Arid lands are vast, but crowded around water sources. So research is needed to address irrigated agriculture in these tension zones between agriculture and urban development," he says.

A new place for invention

Opening this fall, NMSU's Center for Sustainable Development of Arid Lands stands ready to foster new discovery and renew a focus on the problems of arid lands with state-of-the-art laboratories and equipment.

"The idea of the new center is to create a place where scientists who think in terms of microorganisms can work with those who think in terms of ecosystems," says Jerry Schickedanz, the college's dean and chief administrative officer. "Often, when scientists from different disciplines approach the same problem, their ideas never connect. By creating an environment where scientists from different disciplines can interact, we hope to foster those new connections."

To complement the new facility, scientists in the college and across the campus can draw on many resources and collaborators to turn NMSU into a true oasis for desert science. "It's a good place for desert research and will be an increasingly better place for it in the future," Monger says.

Location, location, location

Situated in the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, NMSU is part of an arid region that receives an average of less than 10 inches of rain per year.

"NMSU is one of only two major land-grant research institutions in the United States located in arid lands. The University of Arizona is the other," Cunningham says.

As the largest desert in North America and the only one east of the Continental Divide, the Chihuahuan Desert encompasses about 140,000 square miles in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.

The desert generally falls north of the Mexican Plateau's highlands, west of the Sierra Madre Oriental, east of the Sierra Madre Occidental and south of the Rocky Mountains. With the Rio Grande flowing through the top half of the desert, the region is reminiscent of ancient oases.

NMSU's desert home is near hundreds of square miles of land saved specifically for research. "We have access to lots of land that won't be developed," Monger says. "As time goes by and the population continues to increase, these undeveloped lands will become even more precious and valuable for researchers."

The college itself owns 100 square miles or nearly 64,000 acres of semiarid land known as the Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center (formerly the College Ranch), located about 25 miles north of NMSU's main campus. The Jornada Experimental Range's 300 square miles of rangeland adjoins the research center on the east.

"All of this land was set aside in response to people recognizing that the arid environments of the Southwest were changing and new tools were needed for people to survive and thrive," Cunningham says.

Two nearby military sites-the U.S. Army's Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range-also have large tracts of land available for study.

Vast amounts of land are necessary to unravel research questions related to desert ecosystems, Havstad says. "We need such large landscapes, because we're dealing with ecosystems larger than the size of Doña Ana County."

Laura Huenneke, NMSU's biology department head, agrees. "The USDA land and the college's land combine for an enormous stretch, but it's not too big for the questions we're asking about desert ecosystems," she says.

Huenneke is the principal investigator for the Jornada Basin Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) program, one of 24 sites funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study long-term ecological changes in the United States. The LTER includes field studies at the Jornada Experimental Range and the Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center.

"Our site is known for being the location where a basic understanding of desert ecosystems has been developed," she says.

Large tracts of land also are required for livestock management research, says Bobby Rankin, animal and range sciences department head. Grazing areas need to be large enough to handle realistic animal stocking rates for desert rangelands.

History repeating: For 85 years, researchers with the Jornada Experimental Range (left in 1924 and right in 1995) have used a pantograph to study changes in vegetation in 1-meter-square plots.

A foundation for success

Scientists in the area have a rich history of studying everything from animals and plants to soil and water in the desert.

"Some of our original faculty members-from when NMSU was the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts-are still well-known for their important arid lands research," Cunningham says.

Beating the heat: NMSU animal scientist Milt Thomas breeds cattle for the desert. This Brahman bull, one of three foundation sires in the research program, has good genes for heat tolerance and fertility.

For example, the college's first resident botanist, E.O. Wooton, joined the faculty in 1888. During his career, he named 231 new plant species and published the first Flora of New Mexico,which stood as the only New Mexico botany manual for 65 years.

Studies began at the rangeland research center in 1927, when an act of Congress set aside the land for "research and instructional purposes."

"It's pretty well accepted that in the late 1800s, the range was overstocked and overgrazed by cattle," Rankin says. "That was when there was no prior knowledge about plant growth rates in the desert."

Animal and range scientists have since found that moderate to light livestock grazing can be profitable and sustainable, he says. But the research continues. "We have some projects that have been going on for 25 or 30 years."

In one study underway since 1967, range scientist Reldon Beck analyzes how different grazing systems affect the range, comparing seasonal rotations and continuous grazing. Other research-now under the supervision of animal scientist Milt Thomas-has focused on breeding cattle that are best adapted to the desert's high temperatures and sparse forage.

Scientists are still trying to understand which changes in the rangeland are due to humans and animals and which are caused by drought and other natural causes, Rankin says. "We're still measuring trends. We've been through three severe droughts during my 39-year tenure here. Studying such factors in the desert takes a long time and a lot of data."

NMSU adjunct scientists with the Jornada Experimental Range have no shortage of data, either. Research there started in 1912.

"Almost 100 years ago, we knew that we needed new ideas and new technologies to manage and remediate deserts, because the conditions are so different than in other parts of the country, such as the Midwest and Northeast," Havstad says.

Unearthing secrets: Curtis Monger, an NMSU soil scientist, goes underground in trenches in southern New Mexico (pictured), Big Bend, Texas, and Mexico to study microscopic pollen fossils and isotopes in caliche that give clues about the cyclical nature of deserts.

In one project started in 1915, Jornada researchers have kept track of ecological changes taking place on the range using a pantograph. Year after year, grasses and shrubs found in 104, 1-meter-square plots called quadrats have been carefully mapped by hand.

Recently, data from the deteriorating maps-some now 80 years old-was rescued for further analysis on how the desert has changed over time. Researchers with the Physical Science Laboratory on the NMSU campus scanned the two-dimensional drawings into a computer and cleaned, enhanced and transformed them into three-dimensional images.

Cunningham says NMSU's tradition of arid lands research got a boost in the late 1960s with NSF funding of the International Biological Program and the Desert Biome Study. "We were an important site for basic ecological research, because we are the most arid of the grassland sites," he says. "The emphasis of these projects was on developing computer simulations for managing arid lands."

This biological work, coupled with the science coming from the Desert Soils Project (see story on A Pilgrijmage to the Desert Project), set the stage for NMSU becoming an LTER site in the early 1980s.

Ample experts, good connections

Along with abundant historical data, NMSU and southern New Mexico have an ample supply of experts. "We have it all," Havstad says. "We have biologists, geochemists, plant physiologists, animal scientists, landscape ecologists, geomorphologists and hydrologists."

Fisher sees strength not only in the numbers, but also in the breadth. "We're especially strong in soil science, genetics, molecular biology and crop improvement of cotton, onions, chile and ornamentals," he says. "We have scientists working on very basic biological questions as well as very applied, practical problems."

Already, scientists across the NMSU campus team up with scientists at the Jornada. "We don't worry too much about our affiliations," Havstad says. "If you convene at the oasis, you really don't have to worry about which funding brought you there."

Some of the newest technologies bring together scientists from NMSU, the Army Research Laboratory at White Sands and the Directorate of the Environment at Fort Bliss in the Center for Applied Remote Sensing in Agriculture, Meteorology and Environment (CARSAME).

Work at the center combines the techniques of precision agriculture with global positioning satellite (GPS) systems and remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS).

Warming up: This map of the Chihuahuan Desert and Rio Grande region estimates early morning surface temperatures in July based on an image taken by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite. The cooler the color, the cooler the temperature. Yellow represents about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The darkest purple and black areas show cloud cover.

"We live in a very sparsely populated region and about the only way to monitor the whole area is by satellite remote sensing," says CARSAME director Max Bleiweiss with the Army Research Laboratory.

The technology could be used to monitor the range and detect insect outbreaks and disturbances like drought, dust storms and fires. "Our mission is to interpret this data and make it accessible to help farmers and researchers alike," Bleiweiss says.

Strong connections are being forged as well with scientists throughout the nation and the world.

The Jornada LTER site is part of a national and international research network. "We make our data available, and we encourage other scientists to come and work here. We do a really good job of that," Huenneke says. When someone wants to study wind erosion, for example, the LTER already has climate and soil data available.

In addition, NMSU administers a federal mini-grant program, known as the Southwest Consortium on Plant Genetics and Water Resources, that awards "seed" money for innovative plant biotechnology research related to agriculture in arid and semiarid regions.

Members of the consortium, which also includes Los Alamos National Laboratory, Texas Tech University, the University of Arizona and the University of California at Riverside, meet annually to share ideas and research results.

NMSU also is a founding member of the 12-year-old International Arid Lands Consortium (IALC), which funds research and demonstration projects in arid lands.

"Our strength is our study of human habitation in arid lands and our research on how to use water efficiently for human needs, including the production of food and fiber," Cunningham says.

The consortium has earned respect in the Middle East as a source of sound scientific information about arid lands, says IALC managing director Jim Chamie.

"What we learn working in other lands is applicable to New Mexico and vice versa," Cunningham says. "Having partners around the world helps us find common solutions, and we try not to repeat mistakes."

	Beating the heat: NMSU animal scientist Milt Thomas breeds cattle for the desert. This Brahman bull, one of three foundation sires in the research program, has good genes for heat tolerance and fertility.
	Unearthing secrets:Curtis Monger, an NMSU soil scientist, goes underground in trenches in southern New Mexico (pictured), Big Bend, Texas, and Mexico to study microscopic pollen fossils and isotopes in caliche that give clues about the cyclical nature of deserts.

Futuristic ideas, unlimited possibilities

As the elements come together for more integrated and well-equipped research, Cunningham looks forward to new opportunities.

"We'll develop new and better crops and look for more effective, targeted ways to deal with pests and diseases," he says. "Environmentally sound solutions are particularly important in arid lands where there is such a close proximity between people and agriculture."

Cunningham is excited about several federal initiatives that are being considered for joint funding with other agencies in 2001. These projects include looking at more efficient irrigation in the Rio Grande basin, and developing new plants to restore disturbed lands and new technologies for monitoring rangeland and harvesting chile.

Technology needs to change with the times, Havstad says. "Science doesn't dictate. Science responds."

High-tech tracking equipment for cattle may be the wave of the future.

Now and again, Havstad adds, such work includes a futuristic idea like Dean Anderson's new alternative to fences for grazing management. A high-tech, prototype instrument for cattle can track the animals on the range with satellite technology and keep them out of fragile areas near rivers by deterring them with sound. Eventually, this instrument could be the size and cost of an ear tag.

Innovations will feed into educational programs. The latest technologies developed in the oasis will be shared with arid lands farmers and policy makers through NMSU's Cooperative Extension Service, Cunningham says. And tomorrow's desert scientists will work alongside today's top-notch faculty.

"Our strength is that our faculty work closely with our graduate and undergraduate students," Fisher says. "That mix of intimacy with fine lab space and good equipment makes for a very good learning environment."

An environment that continues an ancient legacy of innovation in the desert.