Each spring WildEarth Guardians' members, supporters and volunteers become Stream Team Activists by gathering pledges and planting trees for each pledge. These trees become restored streamside habitat for wildlife such as endangered Southwest Willow Flycatchers and beavers.
WildEarth Guardians’ Vision for Stream Team
Our vision is to heal degraded waterways with volunteers like you who help us plant native vegetation. We believe that the simple act of planting native trees can have a profound effect on hastening the recovery of the West’s arteries of life—our rivers and streams. Fore more than a decade, WildEarth Guardians has been working to implement our vision of restored streams that are teeming with native fish and wildlife, providing clean water, and inspiring us with their beauty. To respond to the ecological crisis caused by more than a century of livestock grazing and poor land management, WildEarth Guardians pioneered a new path in 1996 by becoming the first organization to lease state school trust lands for the purpose of conservation. Since then, we’ve acquired more leases and started new restoration projects with cities, counties, and private landowners.
Why Do Rivers Need to Be Restored?
Southwest streams provide habitat for 75% of native plants and animals as well as abundant supplies of clean water that sustain us. Though streams and rivers represent a mere 1% of the landscape, they are critically important to entire ecosystems. Unfortunately, damaging activities have made Southwestern streams one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America. Waterways across the Southwest have been ravaged by livestock grazing for more than a century causing native vegetation to be stripped away, soil and stream bank erosion, and destroying once-lush streamside forests.
WildEarth Guardians Preserves and River Restoration
Riparian zones, when fully functional, help regulate river flow by mitigating the destructive potential of flash floods and storing water for steady release throughout dry periods. Follow this link to read more about our river restoration work Read more.
