A paper presented at El Paso’s Third Chihuahuan Desert Conference, Part 1 of 3.
November 16, 2023

by Rick LoBello, Zoo Education and Conservation Curator

Over the past century conservationists living and working in the Chihuahuan Desert region of Mexico and the United States have dedicated their lives to protecting large areas of habitat in West Texas, Southern New Mexico and Northern Mexico.

To help ensure that large areas of habitat remain both protected and connected, it is important that stakeholders in the region come together to develop and implement strategic plans focused on protecting the desert’s biodiversity including fragile wetlands and wildlife corridors. In this report I will address current issues, challenges and recent successes in protecting the Northern Chihuahuan Desert Region.

All around the country and all around the world there are beautiful landscapes and ecoregions. During my lifetime I have been fortunate to have been able to visit and experience many of them from the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East to the savannas of Kenya, parts of China and Southeast Asia, all of North America and parts of Central America and the Virunga Volcanoes of Rwanda.  My next big adventure is a return trip to Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas and the savannas of Akagera National Park.  The trip will benefit the Zoo’s conservation fund and all of you are invited to join me.   

Every place I have visited has its unique communities of animals and plants, geology and cultures.   It is here in the Chihuahuan Desert that most of us call home, where we work and live, where we have come to know and love a very special desert with its amazingly display of biodiversity, so important to the global ecosystem and the future of humanity, it is here in our desert that so many of us here today are most concerned.

Like many of you I love the Chihuahuan Desert and want to do all I can to help hold all the pieces together,  one of the main reasons why we have organized this conference, to help bring together educators and researchers all for the same cause, to preserve and protect nature.

For several decades now the Chihuahuan Desert has been a hotspot for conservation in the Southwest US and northern Mexico. Efforts to protect this eco-region go back to the early part of the last century when in 1912 President William Howard Taft signed a Presidential Executive Order creating the Jornada Range Reserve in southern New Mexico, later renamed the Jornada Experimental Range.

Thirteen years later in 1923 the U.S. National Park Service began what would be a 43-year effort to protect other large tracts of Chihuahuan Desert. Carlsbad Cave National Monument, later to be called Carlsbad Caverns National Park, was established by President Calvin Coolidge who signed a proclamation on October 25, 1923. White Sands National Monument was established ten years later in 1933 and then re-designated as a national park in 2019.

On February 16, 1935 Texas Senator Morris Sheppard wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting a park of international scope in the Big Bend area. Although the park of international scope did not make it off the planning table, Big Bend National Park was established on June 12, 1944.  Twenty-two years later Guadalupe Mountains National Park was established in 1966 and most recently here in El Paso a long fought for battle to protect a large area of the Franklin Mountains became a reality when on March 21, 2023 President Biden made protection of the Castner Range a National Monument.

Other government agencies at both the State and Federal level have also played a role in protecting Chihuahuan Desert habitat including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Forest Service, the State of New Mexico and the State of Texas.   

According to the National Park Service’s Chihuahuan Desert Inventory and Monitoring Network, over 90% of the ecoregion is located within the Nation of Mexico.  Since 1992 there have been a number of significant conservation designations in Mexico including three large protected areas adjacent to Big Bend National Park:  in 1992 of the Maderas del Carmen Protected Area in northern Coahuila and the Santa Elena Canyon Protected Area in northern Chihuahua and then in 2009 the Ocampo Flora and Fauna Protected Area in the state of Coahuila. Other notable conservation efforts have helped to protect Cuatro Cienagas Biosphere Reserve in Coahuila and Mapimi Biosphere Reserve in Durango.

You can support efforts to protect the Chihuahuan Desert by becoming a member of the Chihuahuan Desert Education Coalition.