The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, a new program in Arizona is helping to keep native wildlife populations safe from our dangerous roadways.

(Patricia) You don't want to see anybody get hurt, the animals on the road or have any car accidents involved because of it, so it just became a very special thing to get involved in to be part of it.

(Tom) You might call it an obsession or maybe it's just a passion.

Meet a man with over 10,000 rare and unusual plants.

(Mark) When you make a hybrid, you're making something that does not occur in nature, so you're the first one to see a new life form.

(Tom) Architects from around the country are restoring this endangered historic site along the US-Mexico border.

(R. Brooks) We want to create a generation of ambassadors to be able to go out and tell the story of Camp Naco, but also tell the story of the values behind Camp Naco.

(Tom) Take a trip to Buenos Aires without leaving Arizona.

(Jean) It's a truly wild place.

You can see birds, animals, and plants being themselves.

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

First up, all around the world, wild animals are being driven from their native habitat and separated into smaller pockets that reduce their ranges in genetic biodiversity, but here in Arizona, wildlife corridors are helping animals stay connected by allowing them to travel away from dangerous traffic conditions.

(upbeat music) ♪ TENSE PIANO ♪ (Carianne) Hi everybody, welcome back to the Wildlife Crossing crew for our monthly volunteer gig.

We're stacking up a lot of plants out there and part of what we're going to be doing today is really continuing to get these plants off to a good start with their establishment periods.

♪ UPLIFTING GUITAR ♪ Feel free to overachieve.

(Carolyn) Right now we're standing on one of our wildlife crossings that have been built with regional transportation funds over the last almost 20 years.

♪ UPLIFTING GUITAR CONTINUES ♪ This is the only overpass in the Sonoran Desert thus far, but we have underpasses throughout the region to help wildlife get through to different protected preserves.

♪ UPLIFTING MUSIC ♪ There's three miles of funnel fence up and down on each side.

So they're high enough that deer can't jump over and then at the bottom we have finer mesh so rodents and snakes and such can't get through.

When the Game and Fish Department put these video cameras in a couple months after these were built, they really thought it was going to take a couple years to get the animals trained to go down the funnel fence and find.

There were deer almost waiting for this bridge to be built.

I mean they were just bringing their whole families over like right away.

We have seen an average of 2,000 crossings a month in the nine years since this has been built.

We've got over 40,000 animals between the underpass and the overpass that cross.

It's incredible.

We have the Catalina Mountains here, which is Forest Service Land in Catalina State Park, so that's protected.

Once the animals have crossed the bridge, there is about 5,000 acres of open space over here heading straight towards the next mountain range, the Tortolita Mountains.

And then on the west of that is the Tucson Mountains, which is where you see Saguaro National Park, again, protected land Tucson Mountain Park, and then on to the Tohono O'odham Nation.

So, this is a lot of undeveloped open space, most of it protected.

So if we can have the entire three ranges reconnected, it would be a big boon for wildlife.

These open spaces and habitat preserves get isolated, and so a lot of animals, they don't even want to go near the road because of the noise and the lights, so they stay in their bedroom, so to speak.

And so this helps to keep the genetic pool healthy.

(Carianne) And these are just perfect sized.

Sometimes we're going to get lucky with our soil, it's going to be soft, and we can just push these right in.

My name is Carianne Funicelli, and I'm the owner of Strategic Habitat Enhancements, and I focus on native plant materials, and my background is in vegetation ecology, botany, and habitat restoration.

I'm looking to accomplish an assemblage of plants that is native, appropriate to the site, and useful for wildlife.

And a lot of times when we hear about restoration, it puts our mind in a place where we're harkening back to restoring something from the past.

But that's pretty- it's becoming more and more of an outdated way to think about restoration.

We're really restoring for the future, so choosing species that are appropriate now and will be successful now, and that we can expect will be successful into the future as well because things are changing pretty fast.

One day, real soon, this one will be as large as that one.

The climate, the weather patterns are becoming more and more intense.

We have very wet years, very dry years, super hot years, lots of drought.

We want to be sure that we're not choosing species that are on the wimpier end of being able to handle all of those harsh conditions.

(Riley) I'm studying environmental science, so I get notified about volunteering activities in the area So I heard about this, I worked with my schedule.

And I like helping out the environment, so I decided to come today.

I think projects like this are great, you know, they're actually doing something instead of just like making a proposal or talks about something.

And volunteering, you know, I love volunteering, I grew up volunteering, so I try to when I can.

(Virgil) I don't have a environmental background.

I'm an engineer, both chemical and software, but this work gives me hope that we can continue to keep the planet alive and growing and diverse and all its elements for everyone.

(Carolyn) This bridge was built in 2015, as was the underpass that's a mile south of here.

♪ ENIGMATIC PIANO ♪ The underpass is between two housing developments and the people there were a little nervous when we talked about bringing wildlife through there, you know, but once they actually started experiencing it, people are so supportive.

(Pat) My husband and I are members of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, and we've been involved with them for several years since we've moved here.

Came from Michigan, 10 years, roughly 10 years ago, and we moved here because both of our children had moved out here, and we came out to visit and just fell in love with it.

(Henry) It is really nice living this close to the underpass because our house is this one with the solar panels on it right here.

Easy walking distance so we can see it from over the fence in the backyard and so on.

we're volunteering and watering your saturating plants at the bridge and the underpass.

I'll fill the buckets up at the house, bring them out here and either as a group or myself will just come down and water some of the plants to saturate the ground a little bit.

No irrigation at all other than what comes down from the clouds.

♪ ENIGMANTIC JAZZ ♪ (Pat) Waking up every day to look at the Catalina Mountains and all the wildlife that we see is just absolutely spectacular.

(Henry) It's a gopher snake, about four foot long.

They're non-poisonous- mostly feed on rodents and so on.

They're a good snake, good neighbor.

(Pat) It helps us forget about all the fishing and all the water in the lakes that we used to partake in back home.

♪ UPLIFTING PIANO ♪ I'm very thrilled actually with the success of the initial seeding.

These grasses are amazing and we have about five species that really came through from that seed mix and have provided those initial needs of cover, erosion control, and it's quite beautiful as well.

Now is the time that we come in and be like, "Okay, well what's missing?

What else can we bring?

What other kinds of botanical diversity can we incorporate here that are going to amp up the values even more?"

Because this is a really unique and special spot.

♪ SOOTHING SYNTH ♪ (Pat) You don't want to see anybody get hurt, the animals in the road, or have any car accidents involved because of it.

So it just became a very special thing to get involved in, to be part of it.

(Carolyn) And there's still some wildlife, some roadkill, but it's so rare.

The coalition formed in 1998 really to protect species and to protect habitat.

We have morphed into really looking at wildlife connectivity as we find out that even when you have large protected preserves for wildlife, if they get isolated, then it really doesn't work for animals.

So we've really been working on trying to piece together a connected preserve.

(soft music) Next up, Tucson resident Mark Dimmitt is obsessed with rare plants.

So much so that he is known as the king of rare specimens and the champion of botanic oddities.

And he has more than 10,000 plants of his own.

(upbeat instrumental music) - How do I describe my property?

I don't call it a landscape because a landscape architect would freak out at what they do when they come here.

They don't see any sense of design.

I put the plant where I think it will grow the best.

I'm a plant collector is what I am.

There are a lot of people like me who would call ourselves plant freaks.

And I like to say that there's no 12 step program to help us out of this addiction.

I moved to Tucson in 1979 with a moving van full of plants.

Today, my inventory is out of date, but I would estimate that I have about eight to 10 thousand plants in pots.

And probably a similar number in the ground.

I call this my berry cage because I grew mostly various kinds of berries in here.

I grow only thorn-less varieties of berries because I'm tired of shedding blood for my fruit.

I give the extras to friends that's the best thing I can do with them.

I have three greenhouse areas full of tropical plants that need climate control.

Some people like flashy, flowering tropicals.

I like anything that's weird.

I understand why they look that way.

They're adapted to their environment.

To me that enriches my experience of enjoying the plants.

This is a cactus from the Amazon.

This is a hybrid that I really love because it's almost always in flower so it puts on a great show whenever anybody comes to visit.

My primary passion for the last 40 years has been hybridizing Adeniums.

By the time I figured out what it was, I was just obsessed with it because it had beautiful flowers and it had a beautiful twisted stem on a fat base.

It had everything I like in a weird plant.

And I'm one of the people who helped to introduce them, to popularize them in this country.

And according to my friends in Asia my first hybrid has triggered the interest there too.

So I'm kind of the grandfather of Adenium horticulture.

A lot of people call them desert roses, but I don't like that name.

So just remember Adenium, it's only three syllables.

Easy to learn.

When you make a hybrid, you're making something that does not occur in nature.

So you're the first one to see a new life form.

So it's a lot of tedious work in between seeing two plants you'd like to cross, and seeing the results a few years later.

Patience and real dedication is necessary to do a collection like this.

Very few people want to do that.

Most people have other things to do in their lives.

And I do too but plants are number one.

I'm very happy to be out here for days at time without seeing or talking to another human being.

And not that I don't have friends, I have a fair number of friends.

They're almost all plant related friends.

And we get together and mostly talk about plants and a few other things at times.

(laughs) People think I've sacrificed my life for plants.

Yeah, it's true.

Basically I don't do anything else.

I need to be surrounded by beauty.

And now we take you to Buenos Aires, not Argentina, but to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge.

It sits only 60 miles west of Tucson, but it feels a world apart from the Sonoran Desert.

♪ PEACEFUL AMBIENT MUSIC ♪ (Sally) The refuge here is about 118,000 acres.

It was established in 1985 for the purpose of protecting and managing semi-desert grasslands as well as endangered species with the emphasis on the masked bobwhite quail.

It's a highly endangered bird.

We have the captive flock that we have on refuge is comprised of about 99% of the entire species.

It's just a beautiful, unique place removed from the city, wide open public land for anybody to visit.

Because we had-because this was an old ranch, there is a big network of roads for people to travel.

They are all public roads.

We have a large hunt program in conjunction with Arizona Game and Fish.

And so a lot of hunters come down here.

[ BIRD CHIRPING ] But also it's a very popular bird watching refuge.

The Aravaca Cienega is probably the hotspot for the refuge because it has water and a nice trail and boardwalk.

And a lot of people go there.

This is an important bird area.

The entire refuge is designated as an important bird area.

It's like Madera Canyon and so forth.

And you get a huge diversity of birds.

Checking it out.

(Peter) Well, I've been associated with the Aravaca Watershed Education Task Force for many years.

And we study the water resource of Aravaca and the basin we live in, which is a kind of isolated little basin from which we all draw our water.

And really the entirety of the basin funnels down to this area of the Cienega and creates a beautiful wetland with usually a flowing stream through it.

And it's a wonderful place with big cotton woods and wonderful riparian area.

Startling things can happen.

You can walk around here and see bobcats, mountain lions, javelina, really rare birds like gray hawks, you know all kinds of different things that you really can't see even a mile away.

♪ SOOTHING AMBIENT MUSIC ♪ [ RUNNING WATER ] (Jean) It is a surprising place.

I've decided it's a truly wild place due to the fact the refuge limits, how many people can come in.

You can see birds, animals and plants being themselves.

They're relatively undisturbed.

♪ SOOTHING AMBIENT MUSIC ♪ We're at the northern edge of a lot of Mexican species, also birds and plants.

So you see things in here you don't see in Tucson.

This is 20 miles north of the border and the ecosystem is significantly different here.

[ RUNNING WATER ] (Bob) You got mountains, you got grasslands, you got the bajadas coming off from the mountains, you got forests like this, the Cienega.

And as any ecologist knows, when you have the addition of water, particularly in the desert, you get a massive amount of other things.

You know, you get the diversity.

You know both on the flat and in the air.

♪ SOOTHING AMBIENT MUSIC ♪ (Sally) It's amazing to me what lives here and the diversity, how much-how much plant life and animal life is out here and the adaptations they have to survive out here.

It never ceases to amaze me.

(Peter) I think of it as a backyard.

It's great to have a lot of public land around.

Land that you can just access very quickly and walk around and have a real natural experience and go for, walk for an hour, even days.

(Jean) I feel it is a strong privilege to work here as a volunteer.

I keep learning, I keep experiencing.

I love sharing what I do know with them.

The ranching history stories are very interesting.

And I always remind them that most of them own this land.

This is their land indeed because it's federal land.

So I remind them of that and encourage them to appreciate conserving it.

And they do, and many come back.

♪ CALM AMBIENT MUSIC ♪ One of the most endangered historic sites in the United States is a former military post on the US Mexico border.

It's called Camp Naco, and it was built for African-American Buffalo soldiers back in the early 1900s.

Well, now it's inspiring a whole new generation of architects from all around the United States.

[ CAR PASSING BY ] ♪ MELODIC GUITAR ♪ [ CHATTING ] (Milan) My name's Milan Jordan.

I'm director of the HOPE Crew Program for The National Trust for Historic Preservation.

♪ EMOTIONAL VIOLIN ♪ HOPE Crew is an acronym that stands for Hands-On Preservation Experience.

We were born 10 years ago to help repopulate the preservation trades.

We do projects all around the country where we do short two to six week trades experiences.

[ DRONE BUZZING ] The program has evolved over the years to include more documentation training.

So we've been engaging architecture students to help them get a better grip on the preservation trades and to sort of see with the crosshairs between architecture and preservation line.

-So are you taking a break?

[ SHOVELING DIRT ] (Kiana) I'm Kiana Wilcher.

I am currently a fourth year architecture student at Tuskegee University, originally from Columbia, South Carolina.

When I first saw the camp, I didn't realize like how much of it was like still here.

Cuz when you think of like dilapidated buildings, most of my version is wood cuz I'm from like the southeast.

So that's what most of our buildings are made of.

So when those are like in disrepair, they're really, really falling down.

But most of this is still here.

You can still see what it would have looked like.

So it's pretty cool to see like okay they have stuff to work with here.

We can do something with this.

People could still use this.

And it was very obvious when you first see it.

(Eric) Take it and pour the water in there.

This year, I think we need a little bit more to make than adobe.

I do adobe preservation, teaching adobe and line plaster workshop.

♪ UPLIFTING STRINGS ♪ We teach our skills to other people.

So that's why I like doing adobe work.

Cuz then we bring back the past and restore the building back to life.

-I'm gonna smack it on the ground so that I can tap, tap, tap.

-There you go guys.

(Eric) Cuz when they built these buildings, they built them with a lot of hard work.

And they took time and effort.

And for us to come back and restore it, it gives us a great sense of pride to do that.

So we enjoy what we do.

(Milan) Camp Naco came onto our radar last year.

It was one of the 11 most endangered places, which is a national advocacy campaign that the National Trust puts out annually.

We thought that it was a really unique lens on race and place and a really unique site.

One common pitfall of historic sites, which enables them to become very endangered is vacancy.

And so this site has been vacant since the 90s and it saw a very rapid decline since then.

So it's really important to revitalize places and to get them used again, loved, maintained by the community.

So that was how we came about the site and we thought the students could help revitalize it to get it used by the community again.

(Nader) My name is Nader and my last name is Zakersoltani I'm a master's student in architecture in Morgan State University.

I'm from Iran originally and I'm bachelor in architecture and master in restoration and rehabilitation of historic building and sites.

I migrated to United States about three years ago.

And after a while, I decided to update my knowledge about the US architecture and another master in architecture.

In this fellowship, I learned a lot about the history of Southern Arizona, about the Camp Naco, and I found out how it's important, Camp Naco for this area and about the mining and everything in this area.

(Molly) Molly Baker, I am the Hope Crew Manager for The National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Our goal is to bring preservation trades and preservation opportunities to a younger and more diverse audience.

There's so much to learn through the methods that these buildings were constructed.

- So they put like multiple reinforcements (Molly) By walking through them and seeing what their uses were, even the building elements, I'm a Mason's daughter and I'm getting to try my hand at adobe for the first time and seeing how traditionally it was made, there's a connection to the buildings that we see around us when you really get your hands in there and see the materials they were constructed with and it ties us to our past in a way, we get to feel a connection to the original builders, to the people that walked this site and who live their lives here.

(Adia-Simone) Originally I'm from Queens, New York but I currently reside in West Palm Beach, Florida and I'm attending Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida I think the biggest thing about knowing what the camp was made for, the Buffalo Soldiers, how they resided here and the connection to the U.S.-Mexico border as well, has definitely had an eerie impact I guess you can say on me, actually being on the site is different than just hearing about the site, so it's definitely been an experience and we're definitely learning more history that I didn't even know and now later on when I go back to school I can start sharing that information and also maybe someone in the field that I'm working in will know that information and I can also add on to it.

(R.Brooks) We want to create a generation of ambassadors to be able to go out and tell the story of Camp Naco but also tell the story of the values behind Camp Naco, it's not just about the bricks and mortar, it's about the values of preserving a heritage that has really been underrepresented and this is our opportunity to do that with the next generation.

(Milan) I hope they take away from this a better understanding of preservation and existing buildings.

There's a billings index that gets published each year and for the first time a year or two ago architects were billing more hours towards existing buildings than they were towards new construction.

So it's important for architecture students even if they don't go into preservation, even if they don't call themselves a preservationist, that they understand historic and existing buildings because it's going to be a part of their career regardless.

[MUD SLAPS] (Kiana) After I get my architecture degree I do plan to get a license and then get a master's after that and so mostly what I want to do with my degree is kind of what people are doing here just making spaces that mean something to people that are important for the people that are there and that will last for them.

That's my main goal as an architect is to just build things for people and necessarily just make stuff.

(Adia-Simone) Working with adobe, you know, limes, cactus leaves, it's definitely different for me, I wouldn't say I'm an outdoor girl at all, It's been enjoyable and fun because of the people that you're also with, it's been different but it's been fun.

[ LAUGHTER ] ♪ GUITAR FADES ♪ Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you again next week.