Theoretical Underpinnings of Rangeland Monitoring

Monitoring of rangelands has evolved from traditional focus on plant communities and their successional status, taken from a few selected subsamples, to much broader perspectives. Rangelands, being complex biosocial systems, offer a near infinite array of possibilities for choice of variables and how to collect and interpret the data. Past monitoring approaches have inadequately considered objectives, critical definitions, and appropriate sequencing of steps taken. While management objectives should ideally have primacy in choice of variables used in inventory and monitoring, there are some countervailing advantages in employing some commonalities in monitoring protocols among tracts of rangelands. Inventories should come before monitoring. Assessment should follow collection of an adequately long time series of data which is the essence of monitoring. Trends involve judging whether the monitoring data show increases, decreases, or stable trajectories. Assessment involves an always at least partially subjective judgement of condition in relation to appropriate standards and objectives. We are no longer limited to just plant community data collected annually in a few conveniently and subjectively chosen quadrats. Geomatics (remote sensing, GIS, and GPS)opens the possibility of frequent, synoptic (everywhere, instantaneously) landscape coverage via satellite imagery. Indisputable evidence of cause(s) requires concurrent data on these influences along with similar trends from similar circumstances (replications) and controls [reference areas lacking the putative cause(s)]. Three alternatives that could replace plant succession as the underlying, dominant theory of rangeland monitoring are: risk assessment, sustainability, and desertification. Risk assessment is well proven where biophysical indicators can be employed. Politically neutral incorporation of socioeconomic considerations have yet to be demonstrated, however. Sustainability is such a broad and diffuse concept that anyone can read into it whatever he or she wishes. Desertification is the preferred macroconcept to guide us into the future, because its use can more objectively encompass both biophysical and socioeconomic features, at any scale in time and space.     

Rangeland Monitoring: Water Quality and Riparian Systems

Ecological concepts serve as a foundation for developing a monitoring program to evaluate water quality and associated riparian systems. Ecological concepts used for developing a monitoring plan must be supported by scientific literature and related to streamflow dynamics and channel interactions. These interactions help determine natural or background habitat quality within and along river longitudinal and environmental gradients from mountains through basins in the western United States. In addition stream size, position in the watershed, and flow are related to sediment sorting, channel bank strength, and channel configuration. These relationships determine channel substrate habitat for aquatic organisms and population diversity. These habitat features may be modified by a channel's ability to store and transport sediment and associated pollutants within a watershed's drainage pattern. Sediment supply, delivery, and timing are altered by differences in snowmelt along elevation gradients, runoff from convective storms, water development history, and stream channel succession. Potential impairment of reference or background aquatic habitat in the western United States is generally sediment related and should be greater in basin river segments and during base flow conditions. Impairment sources can be shown to originate in the steep and first order tributaries of foothill and basin watersheds, and not from valley slopes where supply must cross established riparian zones. Water column, substrate disturbance, and channel bank disturbances may alter amount of sediment and bacteria pollution measured in basins and during base flow conditions.     

Rangeland Monitoring and Fire: Wildfires and Prescribed Burning,Nutrient Cycling,and Plant Succession

Prescribed fires are used to manipulate and manage rangelands, but effective monitoring techniques are needed to ensure that management goals and objectives are being met. The application of an effective fire program on rangelands is not a simple task. Overgrazing by livestock since the early development of the livestock industry has altered the vegetative complex on most rangelands with an increase in woody plants. Because of its relatively low cost, prescribed fire, both cool and warm season, are sustainable practices if proper grazing management is part of the management scheme. Grazing management and prescribed fire have often been treated as separate issues by rangeland managers; however, development and application of an effective prescribed burning program requires an understanding of the relationship between fire and grazing. Ranchers need fuel (grass) to burn and they also need income from livestock, which requires forage (grass, a major part of forage). In the short-term, fire reduces carrying capacity for livestock but, in the long-term, fire increases grass production, resulting in increased carrying capacity. Therefore, some monitoring technique is needed that will allow the manager to budget grass for both fuel and forage. The Grazing Manager (TGM) is a software program that projects both forage production (expressed as animal unit days) and, animal demand (expressed as animal unit days) for each forage year. TGM has been successfully used on the Texas A&M University Research Station at Sonora as a tool to integrate prescribed fire and grazing management.     

A comparison of the effects of the nematodes Radopholus similis and Pratylenchus goodeyi on growth,root health and yield of an East African highland cooking banana (Musa AAA-group)

We combined two protein-marking enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) with a predator gut content ELISA to monitor the movement and feeding activity of commercially-purchased Hippodamia convergens Guèrin-Mèneville (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) under realistic field conditions during two field seasons in central Arizona. The protein-marking ELISAs were used to differentiate released H. convergens from the native beetles. Commercially purchased beetles marked with rabbit immunoglobulin G (IgG) were released into cotton fields and chicken IgG marked beetles were released into adjacent cantaloupe fields. Results showed that the total native beetle abundance in each crop was about the same size. The recovery rates after 15 days for the released beetles were less than 1.0% over all the releases, indicating that they dispersed readily from the release site. Of the recaptured beetles containing rabbit IgG (cotton), 82.2% were recovered in cotton and 11.8% moved to cantaloupe. Of those containing chicken IgG (cantaloupe), 66.5% were recovered in cantaloupe and 33.5% moved to cotton. A predator gut content ELISA was used to determine if there were differences in the frequency of predation of released versus indigenous H. convergens on the silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia argentifolii Bellows &; Perring (Homoptera: Aleyrodidae). The proportion of beetles containing whitefly antigens was always higher for the released beetles than for their native counterparts. Our results demonstrate an approach to combine protein marking and predator gut content ELISAs that allows the simultaneous comparison of feeding and intercrop movement of native and commercially-obtained biological control agents.