Management and habitat restoration stapleton development plan

The Habitat Plan The objective of habitat restoration at Stapleton is to bring back representative portions of the major native plant communities at Stapleton and as much as possible of their associated animal life. These communities change along a gradient that reflects the amount of moisture available to the plants.

The vegetation of the Stapleton site once consisted of a matrix of mixed prairie types that continued unbroken between the narrow corridors of woody vegetation that occurred along the watercourses. The grasslands changed on a gradient from tall grasses on the wetter, sandier soils to short grasses on the drier, clayey soils. A mixed grass prairie was found in the transition areas. Trees were confined to the sandbar channels where coarser and wetter soils were found along the riverbanks and on the floodplains. Shrubs intermingled with the grasses on steep, shaded river banks where lingering snow banks recharged soil moisture along the southeastern slopes of the sandhills.

Where the watertable was close to or at the surface throughout the year, a diverse array of wetland species occurred and supported abundant wildlife. At the margins of these wetlands where water was more intermittent the species changed in response to the amount of available moisture, which is the key to High Plains landscapes. Where natural rainfall is augmented by additional water from sources such as irrigation or where streams are significantly modified by drop structures to retain more water in the channel, a variety of species can be supported which would otherwise not occur at Stapleton. These include many trees and shrubs that characterize the High Plains landscapes of the foothills of the Rockies and similar landscapes in New Mexico. They can be used to greatly enrich the local plant opportunities without requiring the intensive levels of irrigation or maintenance that are needed to sustain many of the more familiar landscape plants used in Denver that corne from the east coast and other places where rainfall is substantially greater.

The following pages outline the major habitats of Stapleton and the character and species of these landscape types.