RANGE CLASSIFICATION, INVENTORY AND MONITORINGCENTRAL ORGANIZING QUESTION/IDEA – Managers often delineate areas that represent homogeneous abstractions of the environment in question. Ecosystem attributes represented in these areas are manipulated and monitored in relation to a goal. Adaptive management requires information on the status of the system through time relative to goals. Important questions are, what kind of information is required and how long to let the system run between measurements?
Monitoring is monitoring only when it results in a management action.
OBJECTIVES (numbers in brackets correspond to course goals):
[2,4,5]Objective 1. Discuss with students the utility of classification, inventory and monitoring
[2,4,5]Objective 2. Describe some of the typical vegetation measurements used in inventory and monitoring and discuss application of each
[2,3,4,5]Objective 3. Relate management objectives and ecological endpoints and discuss the importance of scale. Endpoint might be a desired plant community, a mix of lifeforms, abundance of an individual species or an emerging property like diversity.
[2,4,5]Objective 4. Discuss how relationships among elements and attributes of ecosystems can be used to assess project success in relation to goals.
TEACHING POINTS:
Global. Data is essential to managers, but knowing what to measure is not straight-forward. The way data is collected is always linked to the motivation of the individual, the agency or the firm. Data is of little value until it is analyzed and used for information to address an issue. Information is most beneficial when combined with individual or collective experience to create knowledge. Managers need two things: (a) periodic assessment of the state of the system and (b) an indicator of the integrated response of the system.
Situations become issues when someone or a group of people perceive elements or relationships among elements or attributes of a system are being under or over served. Private and public issues develop around things of value to individuals and groups. Goals emerge from a combination of description of the issue and a desire to perpetuate a value. At that point an inventory or assessment of the elements or attributes of value might be made. That inventory might result in a classification, e.g., classifying plants into functional groups, or correlating soil series into range sites. Classification and analysis might allow identification of one or several problems, which if solved, would address the issue and help meet the goal. A problem defined can then be addressed by setting an action objective. A problem is a deviation from a standard or norm. An alternative action is implemented. Simultaneously, a monitoring plan is developed and put in force to determine if the action addressed the cause of the problem or resulted in a solution.
1. Distinguish between classification, inventory and monitoring; each is accomplished in relation to a goal. Data or procedures used to accomplish any of the above may not be appropriate for another; on the other hand with careful planning they could be. An example of a universal data base is the US standard soil survey. In natural resources, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a data base for the sake of a data base, because you can never remove the biologist from the system. Secretary of Interior Babbitt recently created the National Biological Service to create a national biological database. What will we look for?
2. Ecological classification of an area is often associated with vegetation cover types and considers the climate of the area, geology and landform, and soils. Classification can be based on current status or the potential natural community. For management purposes, rangelands are often classified at the range site or ecological response unit level. Given range sites have the capacity for similar levels of productivity and support similar vegetative composition.
3. Inventory is an enumeration and quantification of resources at a window in time. Inventories are almost always related to a management objective. Inventories may or may not be used for monitoring purposes.
4. Monitoring is necessary only when interest is in the impact of a management treatment. Legalists and University Professors argue the method chosen must be statistically sound and the beginning or base time well represented. The critical issues in monitoring are accuracy, precision, interval and cost of measurements. Frankly, those criteria are rarely useful or justified (cost) at the operational or tactical level of management.
Rangeland systems are open systems. Managerial decisions take place in an environment of risk and uncertainty.
5. As a rule, qualitative measures are most useful at operational scales; quantitative measures are more useful at strategic scales. One should not confuse measurements with inventory or monitoring. Many different methodologies could be appropriate to measure an ecosystem attribute.
- Managers are most interested in integrated system response. Response of what? Response of the things that are of value to us. Managers also want easy measures/indices to make judgements about ongoing treatment impact. For example, “if I do this, this and this, and don’t do that, that, and that” I can expect the system to remain stable or transition to a desired state. An indicator of integrated response might be something like the FIO index.
7. Science is useful to explain data and variability, project a trajectory into the future, anticipate feasibility and identify constraints.
METHOD;
The lecture method will be used to present this material. In the short time allowed for this unit, it will not be possible to make students proficient in the selection or use of techniques.
I. Dynamics of systems
A. remind students of the continuum of steady states from near to none; systems are dynamic and vegetative cover and composition can vary a great deal among years. The more arid the climate, the more difficult and tenuous it is to describe a steady state.
B. Systems tend to fluctuate within a range a variability as reflected in structure and function. The more arid the system the greater the likelihood the normal cycles will not be synchronous or some cycles will so long the system cannot recover from a major perturbation. For example, windows favorable for recruitment (germination and establishment) could occur on scales longer than the lifespan of the target plant. The more humid the environment the greater the likelihood gradual changes will occur and pulsing events become less important.
C. Functional classification of plants (i.e., response to performance modifiers, available nutrients, opportunity for colonization) may be more predictive than phylogenetic systematics (see Lukin’s book on directing succession).
D. Many transitions are not readily reversed.
E. Landscape/Scale is important. Some portion of the landscape should be recovering from different disturbance on multiple temporal and spatial scales.
II. A word on emerging properties like “health” and “biodiversity.” These are supposedly intrinsic attributes of systems; not linked to managerial decisions. How can we know when a system is “healthy?” The jury is out. It is my personal opinion these terms cannot be defined in a meaningful way. Other meaningless jargon includes noun strings like ecosystem dysfunction (the analogue is that ecosystems have psychological disorders?). The terms refer back to thinking of communities as organisms rather than organisms as individualistic responders.
III. Paradigms to describe dynamics and status
1. Clementsian, condition and trend
2. Westoby, states and transitions. Note the modification of Westoby’s idea presented in Holechek et al Figure 7.6 is somewhat different from Westoby’s original presentation of states and transitions and conditions of susceptibility and windows of opportunity. See Chapter 10 Heady and Child.
IV. What to measure; depends of the level of concern and application, e.g., strategic, tactical, or operational level. Elements and attribute(s) measured will be one(s) that best represent(s) the systems response to management (see Odum 1969).
V. Some measurements
A. Organism biomass
B. Vegetation area or cover
C. Organism density
D. Frequency
VI. Utilization as a measure of grazing pressure vs ingestion
A. Utilization is really what disappeared compared to what would have been there had it not been grazed. So, it has 2 major components – standing crop that was consumed and that which disappeared for some other reason.
B. Utilization, per se, is poorly correlated with response of ecosystem attributes, like production, because management can compensate for different levels of herbage removal. Estimates of utilization are often used to monitor the impact of a stocking rate or management practice. (parenthetically, I have never understood why we monitor based on something that disappeared)
C. Effectively, it makes more sense to monitor what remained – I can see it. If nesting habitat is my grazing goal, I can see when vegetation structure and bare ground are “about right.” If livestock production is my goal, I can gain a sense of how much biomass must be available in order for animals to be able to find high quality nutrients. If plant “vigor” is my goal, I can see if sufficient photosynthetic surface remains to continue growth or regrowth within the constraints of environment.
VII. Sustainability
A. How sustainable is this practice and what is the ecological risk? The fact is there is no measurement that can insure a practice is ecologically sustainable. The role of the decision maker is to continuously decide when to take a measurement as the managerial horizon unfolds. Adjustments are made.
B. Again, the more arid the environment, the more erratic the precipitation and the greater the amount of precipitation that comes during the non-growing season, the greater the possibility of not correctly anticipating a major pulsing event, or failure to understand synchronous cycles.
VIII. FIELD SKILLS
1. Determine the average standing crop of vegetation by species in a given range site. Clip vegetation in 2, � m2 quadrats.
2. Estimate stocking rate based on palatable forage.
Total – unpalatable = palatable.
Palatable x harvest efficiency = total that can be ingested
or x utilization
Total that could be ingested � Monthly Ingestion = Animal Unit Months (AUMs)
Monthly ingestion = 2% of body weight, lb, x 30 days
e.g., (.0176) x (1000) x (30) = 528 lb = 1 AUM
3. Determine the density and frequency of plants by species in 10 quadrats.
4. Determine the basal and foliar cover of plants by species in 10 quadrats. Introduce Daubenmire cover classes.
5. Estimate shrub cover vis-a-vis line intercept method based on five 100 ft lines.