In America’s arid southwest, a scientist who’s studied dryland water systems for over 20 years has found the key to transforming barren desert into verdant oases.

That key is so basic, it hardly even merits being called technology, as it’s more or less nature at its natural best.

For the sake of scientists’ obsession with acronyms, it’s called ‘NIDS,’ for Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams. In other words, any assemblage of stones, log jams, or other waterway impediments that cause the flow of a stream or creek to slow.

Once upon a time, a mountaintop crumbled away a bit, and a flood of stones raced down the hillside along the paths of least resistance. These stones lost momentum and lodged themselves in narrow sections of those paths, which became streams and tributaries.

Beavers, going about their own business, replicated the stones’ effect in the mountains with trees at lower elevations, once again interrupting waterways.

As man gradually altered these natural systems to furnish water for their livestock and agriculture, their ability to sustain the land with water in such hot and dry environments diminished.

For 20 years, the US Geological Survey’s Laura Norman has been working in areas of Arizona and New Mexico that see some of the highest temperatures anywhere in the country.

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Nevertheless, by employing NIDS, she’s watched whole landscapes change. Areas where Norman has worked now sustain year-round wetlands, where canopies of green trees shade running water in the middle of scrub desert.

The NIDS structures don’t block the passage of water, but merely slow it down. Slowing the flow decreases erosion and allows the water time to seep into the ground where it can recharge underground reservoirs, or aquifers. In these dark chambers, specialized desert plants reach down to drink. That moisture enters their leaves and evaporates, moistening the air and lowering temperatures below them.

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NIDS, whether that’s a so-called “check-dam,” a bed of stones, or larger cages of stones wrapped in linked chain, trap sediment, improving downstream water quality and creating substrate in which plants can take root. Once in place, the wetland ecosystems that form around NIDS further decrease erosion and support wildlife, the USGS writes. 

Norman conducted a 27-year monitoring study on the season-on-season effects of these NIDS interventions at a desert wetland in San Bernadino. The results were stupendous, with water levels and greenery substantially higher ever year in the section that had simple cages of stones dropped into creeks on the landscape.

It’s neither new nor complicated. It was just a puzzle piece that ranchers, land managers, and native tribes either forgot or didn’t know they needed.

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