Santa Fe River riparian vegetation monitoring

The Taos Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has initiated a riparian vegetation monitoring program for its lands along the lower Santa Fe River just west of La Cienega. The intent of this program is to detect long-term trends in riparian plant communities within a two-mile reach of the river that has been recently excluded from livestock grazing. Historically, the allotment was subject to livestock grazing year round, which continued through the spring of 2004. In 2003, we established a set of vegetation transects to determine baseline conditions under grazing for comparison to later surveys after livestock removal.