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Jon Dale, a director at American Forests, hopes to further restore the once sprawling Tamaulipan thornforest in the Rio Grande Valley.

The Rio Grande Valley was once covered in forest. One man is trying to bring it back.

The Tamaulipan thornforest once covered 1 million acres on both sides of the border with Mexico. Restoring even a fraction of it could help the region cope with the ravages of a warming world.


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Epiphytes dangle from trees at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, one of the few surviving tracts of original thorn forest. "It was coming to places like this that got my wheels turning," says Jon Dale, director at American Forests. The refuge contains a natural wetland that draws birders from around the country.
American Forests employee Jennifer Richmond weighs seeds and stores them inside vacuum-sealed plastic bags. The bags are mostly refrigerated or frozen inside a temperature-controlled room at Marinoff Nursery in Alamo.
Ebony saplings reach toward the sun at Marinoff Nursery in Alamo, Texas. The trees provide food and nesting habitat, making it a "one-stop shop for birds," says Jon Dale, director at American Forests.
Jon Dale peeks inside a plastic tube that shelters a native seedling at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is one of the last places where ocelots breed, and restoration efforts aim to connect isolated thorn forests so the cats can travel between them.

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