Effect of irrigation pumping on desert pupfish habitats in the Ash Meadows, Nye County, Nevada

Abstract

The Ash Meadows area, at the southern tip of the Amargosa Desert in southern Nevada, discharges ground water collected over several thousand square miles of a regional flow system developed in Paleoioic carbonate rocks. Water moves westward across fault contacts from the bedrock into poorly interconnected gravel, sand, and terrestrial-limestone aquifers in the upper few hundred feet of the basin sediments at Ash Meadows.