Welcome to the Southwest Biological Science Center
Terrestrial Systems: Ecology, Biology, and Restoration
High-Flow Experiments on the Colorado River
SBSC Tribal Partnerships
Southwest Biological Science Center
Welcome to the Southwest Biological Science Center (SBSC)! We conduct quality, objective research on the terrestrial and aquatic systems of the Colorado Plateau, Colorado River and its tributaries, drylands across the larger Southwest US, and beyond.
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This publication provides broad guidance for surface management of oil and gas development with a focus on promoting successful reclamation. Successful reclamation depends on sound best management practices, clear standards and expectations, defensible monitoring for effectiveness, and management of production facilities to minimize surface disturbance. This publication provides specific guideline
Combining resilience and resistance with threat-based approaches for prioritizing management actions in sagebrush ecosystems
The sagebrush biome is a dryland region in the western United States experiencing rapid transformations to novel ecological states. Threat-based approaches for managing anthropogenic and ecosystem threats have recently become prominent, but successfully mitigating threats depends on the ecological resilience of ecosystems. We used a spatially explicit approach for prioritizing management actions t
Crop water use dynamics over arid and semi-arid croplands in the lower Colorado River Basin
Numerous studies have evaluated the application of Remote Sensing (RS) techniques for mapping actual evapotranspiration (ETa) using Vegetation-Index-based (VI-based) and surface energy balance methods (SEB). SEB models computationally require a large effort for application. VI-based methods are fast and easy to apply and could therefore potentially be applied at high resolution; however, the accur
Science
Southwest Energy Exploration, Development, and Reclamation (SWEDR)
Approximately 35% of the US and approximately 82% of DOI lands are “drylands” found throughout the western US. These lands contain oil, gas, oil shale, shale oil, and tar sand deposits and the exploration for and extraction of these resources has resulted in hundreds of thousands of operating and abandoned wells across the West. These arid and semi-arid lands have unique soil and plant communities...
New Tools for Modern Land Management Decisions
In an era of rapid land use changes and shifting climates, it is imperative that land managers and policymakers have actionable and current information available for decision processes. In this work, we seek to meet these needs through new data products and decision support tools built on digital soil mapping, new vegetation cover maps, agency inventory and monitoring data sets, and cutting-edge...
Bat foraging ecology along the Colorado River in Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon National Park is a hotspot for bat diversity. Twenty-two bat species have been documented in the Park, more than any other national park unit.