We’re entering 2025 with our biggest portfolio of projects in recent years! We’ll be out in the Sky Islands working with you — our amazing volunteers and supporters — to study and recover vital springs in the region, help wildlife find healthy habitat and pathways to move safely over the landscape, and come together as a resilient community in appreciation of this incredible place we call home. Here is a sneak peek of what to expect from us this year.
Springs
Through Spring Seeker, we will survey springs across the Catalina Mountains and San Pedro Valley, and we’ll continue monitoring springs around the Hermosa Mine in the Patagonia Mountains. Sky Island Alliance is also partnering with the Bureau of Land Management to assess and inventory 50 spring and riparian areas on their lands to track the health of these important sites. We’re hiring new staff to help us with this ambitious monitoring plan. Check out our Spring Seeker Dashboard to see what we’re learning from past Spring Seeker surveys across the region.
Wildlife
Using our recent paper on wildlife crossing rates through different types of border barriers, we will keep advocating for the installation of more small wildlife openings in existing border wall and recommend future border wall designs that allow more species to successfully cross. We will keep our network of wildlife cameras documenting species occurrence and behavior across border habitats from the Santa Cruz River east of Nogales to the San Bernardino Valley. If more border wall is built in our region, as we unfortunately expect to happen, we’ll expand our camera network to document the impacts and recommend mitigation strategies.
Winter bird counts of neotropical bird species are already underway in Sonora to better understand how our grassland restoration efforts with local ranchers are benefiting imperiled species. Learn more about this new project.
The FotoFauna Network will continue to grow its community database of wildlife observations. And we plan to continue our outreach with land managers and other leaders in Arizona and Sonora, so they can use FotoFauna data for conservation planning, wildlife monitoring, and advocacy. Join the project and share your own camera data this year!
Conservation
As an alliance, we work together with a wide range of land managers and conservation groups to protect the Sky Islands. In March, we will convene national park staff from both the U.S. and Mexico to reinvigorate the Sister Parks program and share techniques for managing the Sky Islands. We’ll also work in partnership with many other organizations to advance conservation plans for critical watersheds on both sides of the border.
On the ground in Sonora, our sustainable ranching and habitat restoration projects will expand to new ranches near APFF Bavispe, Mexico’s northernmost national park. Activities powered by the local ranching community and biology students at the Universidad de la Sierra will protect springs and riparian areas through a variety of techniques. These include installing fencing to deter cattle, planting native plants and seeds, building erosion-control structures, and demonstrating how rotational grazing can improve soil health and ranch productivity while benefiting native plants and wildlife.
In Arizona, with our volunteers’ help, we have a full slate of projects planned. We’ll pull invasive plants from six low-elevation springs around Tucson to recover native flora, and we’ll build at least 80 erosion-control structures in the footprint of the Bighorn Fire on Mt. Lemmon. We’ll also close 15 old roads in the Coronado National Forest to recover oak woodland habitat, and we’ll enhance water availability for wildlife along dry stretches of the San Pedro River by installing new drinkers. Further north, we’ll continue pulling any invasive vinca that resprouts along Aravaipa Creek.
We know that it takes many hands to protect and restore what we love across the Sky Islands, so we invite you to join our projects. Check our event calendar throughout the year to see what volunteer opportunities are coming up. Also, note that we are refreshing our volunteer agreement to better explain how we can all make Sky Island Alliance an inclusive and safe space, so keep an eye out for a new agreement and waiver to sign soon!
Community
We hope to see you at one of our upcoming events across the region! We’re especially excited to cohost a booth about jaguars at the Tucson Festival of Books in March with the Rewilding Institute. And we look forward to bringing together the Sonoran community once again this fall at the 4th annual Festival de las Islas del Cielo.