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Results for “Journal of Rangeland Ecology and Management”

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9 recordsLinked to original sources
USGS2026

Quantifying free-roaming horse body condition: A methodological investigation using game cameras and observer bias corrections

Large populations of free-roaming horses (Equus caballus ) inhabit the western United States, Australia, and other arid and semi-arid rangelands globally. In the United States, horse body condition has been the impetus for gathering and removing horses under an emergency designation and has been noted as a common chronic mortality-causing condition. The Henneke body condition scoring (BCS) system is a qualitative index that includes visual appraisal and physical palpation at multiple anatomical locations on individual horses. This method has been shown to be repeatable between different observers with varying degrees of experience when assessing domestic horses at close proximity. Repeatability using the Henneke BCS system is unknown for free-roaming equids in vast environments, and adequately sampling populations in a minimally biased manner can be logistically challenging. However, estimating body condition using photographs has been shown to be a highly accurate alternative to proximal scoring for multiple scoring systems and species. Our study investigates if an automated, remote camera trap system can be used to estimate free-roaming equid body condition. We compiled existing camera trap data sets from 65 traps into a single data set including more than 3.7 million photos containing images of free-roaming horses from California, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. We employed veterinarian-trained animal science students to score horses within randomly sampled, spatially/temporally congruous sequences of animals in our data sets. We compared student scores with veterinarian scores to evaluate whether scorer-specific correction factors are necessary for estimating BCS parameters. Calibration to a fixed reference set reduced between-scorer variance to zero in our population-level BCS estimates. Analysis of our between-scorer variance in our empirical data implies this calibration step can be beneficial when different observers are scoring distinct horse populations across space and/or time.

California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming↗
USGS2024

Browsing the literature

For this edition of Browsing the Literature, we have two new papers from Rangeland Ecology & Management, a series of basic ecology papers with an international scope from journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), Science, and Nature, and several papers advancing our understanding of drought and carbon at global scales. Additionally, several papers on sagebrush-steppe rangelands are covered with transferable insights to other rangeland types.

Rangelands↗
USGS2016

Climatic and topographical factors affecting the vegetative carbon stock of rangelands in arid and semiarid regions of China

Rangeland systems play an important role in ecological stabilization and the terrestrial carbon cycle in arid and semiarid regions. However, little is known about the vegetative carbon dynamics and climatic and topographical factors that affect vegetative carbon stock in these rangelands. Our goal was to assess vegetative carbon stock by examining meteorological data in conjunction with NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) time series datasets from 2001–2012. An improved CASA (Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach) model was then applied to simulate the spatiotemporal dynamic variation of vegetative carbon stock, and analyze its response to climatic and topographical factors. We estimated the vegetative carbon stock of rangeland in Gansu province, China to be 4.4× 1014 gC, increasing linearly at an annual rate of 9.8×10 11 gC. The mean vegetative carbon density of the whole rangeland was 136.5 gC m -2 . Vegetative carbon density and total carbon varied temporally and spatially and were highly associated with temperature, precipitation and solar radiation. Vegetative carbon density reached the maximal value on elevation at 2500–3500 m, a slope of >30°and easterly aspect. The effect of precipitation, temperature and solar radiation on the vegetative carbon density of five rangeland types (desert and salinized meadow, steppe, alpine meadow, shrub and tussock, and marginal grassland in the forest) depends on the acquired quantity of water and heat for rangeland plants at all spatial scales. The results of this study provide new evidence for explaining spatiotemporal heterogeneity in vegetative carbon dynamics and responses to global change for rangeland vegetative carbon stock, and offer a theoretical and practical basis for grassland agriculture management in arid and semiarid regions.

Gansu↗
USGS2002

Rangeland health attributes and indicators for qualitative assessment

Panels of experts from the Society for Range Management and the National Research Council proposed that status of rangeland ecosystems could be ascertained by evaluating an ecological site's potential to conserve soil resources and by a series of indicators for ecosystem processes and site stability. Using these recommendations as a starting point, we developed a rapid, qualitative method for assessing a moment-in-time status of rangelands. Evaluators rate 17 indicators to assess 3 ecosystem attributes (soil and site stability, hydrologic function, and biotic integrity) for a given location. Indicators include rills, water flow patterns, pedestals and terracettes, bare ground, gullies, wind scour and depositional areas, litter movement, soil resistance to erosion, soil surface loss or degradation, plant composition relative to infiltration, soil compaction, plant functional/structural groups, plant mortality, litter amount, annual production, invasive plants, and reproductive capability. In this paper, we detail the development and evolution of the technique and introduce a modified ecological reference worksheet that documents the expected presence and amount of each indicator on the ecological site. In addition, we review the intended applications for this technique and clarify the differences between assessment and monitoring that lead us to recommend this technique be used for moment-in-time assessments and not be used for temporal monitoring of rangeland status. Lastly, we propose a mechanism for adapting and modifying this technique to reflect improvements in understanding of ecosystem processes. We support the need for quantitative measures for monitoring rangeland health and propose some measures that we believe may address some of the 17 indicators.

Journal of Range Management↗
USGS2021

Campfire Conversations at the 2020 annual meeting: Insights & lessons learned from “cuss-and-discuss” rather than “chalk-and-talk”

• The 2020 SRM Annual Meeting piloted “Campfire Conversation,” round-table discussions styled after the World Café approach. • The event attracted 280 attendees and enabled multidirectional knowledge exchange (i.e., “cuss and discuss”), rather than one-way “chalk-and-talk.” Attendees participated in three 20-minute facilitated round-table discussions around three topics they selected from a menu of 13 timely rangeland issues. • Change was a common theme for many Campfire Conversations, including social, climatic, ecological, management, and policy changes. • Participants highlighted a desire for SRM to grow as an organization by enhancing members’ opportunities and resources for multidirectional knowledge exchange among students, scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers; cross-generational mentorship; cross-disciplinary training; diverse ways of knowing; and greater inclusivity and connection to the SRM. • A post-event analysis of the Campfire Conversation event revealed valuable lessons for organizing successful World Café-style sessions at future SRM meetings, including virtual meetings.

The Rangelands Journal↗
USGS2004

National Wildlife Refuge System: Ecological context and integrity

The Refuge Improvement Act of 1997 established a statutory mission and management standards for the National Wildlife Refuge system. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service subsequently issued a policy for ensuring the biological integrity, diversity, and environmental health of the system. This policy requires understanding the management objectives of each refuge in a local, regional, and national context. An assessment of the refuge system in a national and regional context reveals that refuges are typically smaller than many conservation holdings and are unevenly distributed across the conterminous U.S. Western rangelands, coastal wetlands, and northern grasslands; wetlands are the best-represented ecosystems, while temperate forests have the poorest representation. In contrast to other agency holdings or management designations in the national protected areas network (e.g., national parks, national forests, wilderness areas), refuges tend to occupy sites at lower elevations and that have higher productivity and soil quality. This difference points to the important contribution of the refuges in providing much needed ecological balance within the national protected areas network. However, the ecological integrity of the refuge system is challenged by the proximity of individual refuges to development. Overall, the refuges are becoming islands in a landscape matrix of urban and agricultural development. This creates future challenges for meeting management objectives to ensure the biological integrity, diversity, and environmental health of the system. If the policy to ensure biological integrity, diversity, and environmental health of the refuge system is to be successful, it may be more important to address issues about what happens on adjacent lands than uses within refuges.

Natural Resources Journal↗
USGS2025

Reliability of satellite-based vegetation maps for planning wildfire-fuel treatments in shrub steppe: Inferences from two contrasting national parks

Protecting habitat threatened by increasing wildfire size and frequency requires identifying the spatial intersection of wildfire behavior and ecological conditions that favor positive management outcomes. In the perennial sagebrush steppe of Western North America, invasions by fire-prone annual grasses are a key concern, and management of them requires reliable maps of vegetation cover, fuels, and wildfire behavior. We compared commonly used, publicly available vegetation cover and fuels maps, specifically the Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP) and LANDFIRE, with field-based assessments at two U.S. National Parks dominated by sagebrush steppe: City of Rocks National Reserve and Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. Plant-community composition and fuels measured at ∼1700 field locations spanning ∼300,000 ha revealed that 1) RAP generally underestimated each vegetation cover type where the cover was actually abundant, and conversely overestimated cover types where they were actually scarce, and 2) there was considerable disagreement in fuel-bed maps derived from LANDFIRE compared to field observations. As a result, there were substantial discrepancies in the spatial patterning of wildfire behavior estimated from the fire-spread model FLAMMAP when parameterized with LANDFIRE compared to field-based fuel-bed maps created from Random Forests models. Reliable maps of vegetation cover and fuel conditions are needed to help guide fuels and invasive species management, especially given recent increases in pre- and post-fire treatments in arid and semiarid landscapes. The costs associated with poorly informed fuel reduction may greatly exceed the costs of field-based vegetation and fuels inventory to inform effective design of vegetative fuels treatments.

Idaho↗
USGS2025

Reconciling scale using the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) Framework to improve management of woody encroachment in grasslands

Implementing strategies to navigate large-scale ecological transitions in grasslands is one of this century's greatest conservation challenges. In the US Great Plains, managing areas impacted by woody transitions have been reactive, short-lived, costly, and ineffective. Along with current technological innovation in rangeland monitoring, the promise of early warning science is to provide managers with sufficient time to be better prepared for novel signals of ecological change. Combining the science of early warning signals and frameworks such as the Resist – Accept – Direct (RAD) can provide land managers with guidelines to identify proactive strategies when facing ecological change. Using this approach, we found that opportunities to resist woody transitions decreased from 84 % to 60 % between 1990 and 2020 over the entire biome but remained highest in the northern and western Great Plains, which contributes to large scale conservation targets. These are key areas to prioritize resist opportunities. In contrast, 11 % of the biome exhibited early warning transition signals across all hierarchical scales by 2020, a fourfold increase since 1990. Lastly by 2020, 30 % of the biome exhibited early warning signals across multiple but not all scales. Here, efforts may be more effective when management is directed to conserve fragmented grassland legacies within a woody-dominated matrix and avoid large-scale monocultures of problematic encroaching woody species. Our multi-scale study indicates that 1) anchoring to the last remaining grassland core areas with no early warning of transitions and 2) strategically investing in these intact grasslands may provide the best results for grassland conservation.

Great Plains↗
USGS2014

Nesting ecology and nest survival of lesser prairie-chickens on the Southern High Plains of Texas

The decline in population and range of lesser prairie-chickens ( Tympanuchus pallidicinctus ) throughout the central and southern Great Plains has raised concerns considering their candidate status under the United States Endangered Species Act. Baseline ecological data for lesser prairie-chickens are limited, especially for the shinnery oak-grassland communities of Texas. This information is imperative because lesser prairie-chickens in shinnery oak grasslands occur at the extreme southwestern edge of their distribution. This geographic region is characterized by hot, arid climates, less fragmentation, and less anthropogenic development than within the remaining core distribution of the species. Thus, large expanses of open rangeland with less anthropogenic development and a climate that is classified as extreme for ground nesting birds may subsequently influence nest ecology, nest survival, and nest site selection differently compared to the rest of the distribution of the species. We investigated the nesting ecology of 50 radio-tagged lesser prairie-chicken hens from 2008 to 2011 in the shinnery oak-grassland communities in west Texas and found a substantial amount of inter-annual variation in incubation start date and percent of females incubating nests. Prairie-chickens were less likely to nest near unimproved roads and utility poles and in areas with more bare ground and litter. In contrast, hens selected areas dominated by grasses and shrubs and close to stock tanks to nest. Candidate models including visual obstruction best explained daily nest survival; a 5% increase in visual obstruction improved nest survival probability by 10%. The model-averaged probability of a nest surviving the incubation period was 0.43 (SE = 0.006; 95% CI: 0.23, 0.56). Our findings indicate that lesser prairie-chicken reproduction during our study period was dynamic and was correlated with seasonal weather patterns that ultimately promoted greater grass growth earlier in the nesting season that provided visual obstruction from predators.

Texas↗