Agricultural News
Conservation District Representative Testifies at Invasive Species Hearing
Thu, 16 May 2013 12:15:39 CDT
Executive Director of the New Mexico Association of Conservation Districts (NMACD) Debra Hughes testified at today's House Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation oversight hearing on "Invasive Species Management on Federal Lands." Hughes highlighted the success of the "Restore New Mexico" initiative, an aggressive partnership between NMACD, federal, state, private partners, and fellow non-governmental organizations to restore woodlands, grasslands, and riparian areas to a healthy and productive condition.
"In the West, the fragmentation of the landscape due to checkerboard land ownership and jurisdiction makes landscape level restoration efforts difficult," Hughes said. "Restore New Mexico works to overcome those boundaries and have a positive impact on the land on a landscape level, regardless of ownership-federal, state, tribal, or private."
Restore New Mexico represents a broad partnership, with key players including NMACD, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), along with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish and the New Mexico State University Jornada Experimental Range. The initiative works with the local land managers-conservation districts supervisors, BLM field staff, NRCS conservationists, and state officials-to determine the most pressing projects and the best applications to accomplish those goals. This locally led process has enabled great success.
Since the program's inception, more than 2.1 million acres of impaired habitat have been treated, starting the transition to healthy ecological states. Hughes stressed the high efficiency of the program as a key to its success.
"Restore New Mexico places over 93 percent of the dollars on the ground for treatment," she said. "This is possible given that there is only a small overhead needed to administer the program. Landscape-level restoration is efficient because of economies of scale; treating more acres per project lowers the cost per acre of treatments."
To read Hughes' full testimony, click here: http://www.nacdnet.org/doc_download/1206-hughes-invasive-species-testmony.
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