Rangeland Health Assessments Tell Us Where We’re Starting |

7 Jun 2010, Comments (0)

Rangeland Health Assessments Tell Us Where We’re Starting

Author: kvoth

About 20 staff members from Boulder County, the City of Boulder, the NRCS and RCDs participated in the May 19 Rangeland Health Assessment Training. Thanks to Rob Alexander and Meaghan Huffman for setting it up and taking care of all the logistics. Also thanks to our Instructors, Josh Saunders and Herman Garcia of the NRCS. They did the training on short notice and spent two days on-site putting together training materials and taking us through the process. Babe and Leo Hogan also spent most of the day with us, sharing their 50 years of experience on the range.

The first step in our Boulder County “Creating Perfect Pastures” project is to figure out where we are right now. We decided to begin with a Rangeland Health Assessment training session, so that everyone with an interest in the project will be on the same page when discussing our project pasture’s condition, and where we want to go.

A Rangeland Health Assessment assesses how well the ecological processes are functioning on a site. It is a qualitative, communication tool that requires some natural resource and land management experience. It can be used as a preliminary evaluation, to select monitoring sites, and to provide early warnings of potential problems and/or opportunities. Because it only looks at one moment in time, it cannot be used to identify problems, make management changes, or determine trends.

Rob Alexander points out "terracettes" to participants.

We begin with a “reference area” or a site with similar soils, climate, etc. that represents what “should” be happening at our site. It’s important to choose a site that is representative of our pasture as a whole. Choosing the “ugliest” or the “best” area in a pasture will simply skew the results and not give us an accurate picture. Evaluation forms take us through a variety of indicators, and we rate them in terms of departure from the expected. The rating scale is “None to Slight,” “Slight to Moderate,” “Moderate,” “Moderate to Extreme” and “Extreme to Total.” Working in interdisciplinary groups is important because different individuals have different experience and expertise. Talking about what we see as we go through the evaluation helps open our eyes to things we might have missed and communicate about our concerns and goals.

Given our time restrictions we evaluated a portion of the pasture that was readily accessible and provided a good learning opportunity. Because of the range of conditions in the pasture, I would like to do more than one assessment, covering the northern portion of the range, and the prairie dog impacted area. I am looking at the possibility of a day with our rancher participants for these additional assessments.

This is the completed RHA. Click on it to see a full-size version.

Here is the completed assessment as compiled by Josh Saunders. He said, ” It was an interesting site. I set my biotic as a slight to moderate departure. I believe that the site is functioning with respect to hydrology and soil/site stability. I feel that that there was more mortality than drought was causing, also, there appears to be a slightly more build up of litter on the site. I feel that if anything, the nutrient cycling (ecological process) may be stagnating somewhat on this site. If you were planning on upping the stocking density on this site for a short period, I think that it would do it some good.”

To learn more about Rangeland Health Assessments contact your local NRCS office.

Pictures from our day in the field. Click on each to see a larger, downloadable view.