For the last month researchers and volunteers have been traveling to remote parts of Saguaro National Park near Tucson to track down and eliminate invasive species that are changing the Sonoran Desert landscape.
One of the invasive plants, buffelgrass, is literally turning rocky terrain into a grassland, providing a path for fire between decades old saguaro cactus that did not exist before.
Perry Grissom is an invasive species specialist working with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson on the Save our Saguaros campaign.
We spoke with Grissom about the campaign’s push to protect the so-called sentinel of the desert, to learn more about how diverse the vast Sonoran Desert is, and to better understand why the health of saguaro cacti impact the entire ecosystem.
