Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Oklahoma
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) maintains 3 national wildlife refuges in the Lower Rio Grande of south Texas: Santa Ana, Lower Rio Grande, and Laguna Atascosa. Conservation of brushland habitats is an ongoing challenge relative to expanded urbanization, homeland security, and escalating land prices. Managers would benefit from a new edition of the original Biological Report that includes contemporary literature, human demographic patterns, land-use and GIS assessments, U.S.–Mexican border issues, and severity of competing land use. The revised report would continue, even expand, its focus on plant and animal species of special concern relative to USFWS goals of achieving a protective wildlife corridor among currently disjunct land parcels under their management. Research was added in 2011 to evaluated the effects of fragmentation on mammal communities in currently tracts in the Lower Rio Grande Valley NWR.