mystery vegetation lattice

Within the Guadalupe mountains of the New Mexico Lincoln National "Forest". Guadalupe ranger district.

LAT/LON 32.44 -105.05

Township/Range T21S R18E

Lays just off of Guadalupe Rim Road: Guadalupe Rim Road is the unifying name for Forest Roads 540 and 67 on Lincoln National Forest's Guadalupe Ranger District, a roughly 60-mile dirt route that follows the western escarpment of the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico.

Just below it lies Bates Park tank, one of multiple water tanks in the region.

Google earth historical imagery shows that the gridded pattern emerges around 2008ish.

At first I believed this was some type of watershed/flood protection/management earthworks. That some earth-ripping happened and that vegetation settled into the grooves rather than purposeful planting.

I searched the lincoln national park website for for such projects:

There are (current) proposed projects including watershed management within the Guadalupe RD:

• this one got cancelled but mentions our section of land.
• this one is for another land section and hurts the theory, because it mentions watershed management (explicitly: "water diversion ditches") but the satellite imagery shows no similar patterning.

Nobody online mentions it except one person on a facebook google earth anomaly group. Only one commenter offers some speculation: I'm guessing historic livestock corralling and grazing patterns. Looks like thicker stands of trees make up the borders while the lighter vegetated area just doesn't grow well. Cows can do a number on fragile desert ecosystems.There are access roads leading to water tanks for livestock in the area so it's safe to assume some kind of livestock are in play. Just a guess though. Cool find.

33.181, 35.755 Look similar and has similar scale. However the layout and terrain are completely different. Our lattice has continuous straight lines in the North-Sout direction and a broken structure along the East-West direction (which is also downhill). Similar to the stacking of a brick wall. This partly motivated my first theory that this was some type of water channeling project to aid in water dispersion, so it doesn't just run downhill.

However, in a reddit thread someone offers an explanation that could be relevant to our lattice: People clear land and make fences. Birds sit on fence wire. Birds eat fruits and poo seeds. New trees grow under fence lines..

Knowing that a lot of rangeland restoration happens in new mexico, people clearing land and making fences could definitely have happened in the area. Perhaps we are merely seeing the consequences of land parcelation?

🤷‍♂️