Monitoring
Visit RangeSAT website
RangeSAT uses satellite data to generate maps and graphs of vegetation across pastures, ranches, and allotments. Using the record of Landsat data going back to 1984, the interface lets users easily view maps of vegetation amounts across their ranch or management area, at a single point in time or averaged across a month or a season. Vegetation amounts can also be displayed as graphs, allowing users to compare current vegetation amounts to past time periods. Climate variables (precipitation, potential evapotranspiration) can also be viewed alongside graphs of vegetation throughout a growing season.
RangeSAT is an ongoing project being developed at the University of Idaho, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Oregon Ranchers, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and the Northwest Climate Hub.
Visit ESA 2020 meeting webpage.
ESA held a totally virtual Annual Meeting this year from August 3–6 in response to the pandemic. The virtual meeting provided an opportunity for you to join colleagues and leaders from across the field for four days of inspiration and community focused on your research and your career as each of us looks ahead to the future.
Like many science fields, the ecological sciences are being flooded by massive and diverse sources of information. For example, remote sensing platforms, automated sensors, observatory networks, molecular techniques, large-scale or replicated experiments, and predictive (simulation) models are generating enormous amounts of data over time and/or across space. Such big and diverse data are opening up new avenues of research and enabling ecologists to address more complex questions and hypotheses that, for example, span multiple scales and disciplines. However, this information deluge also creates challenges in terms of methods available for harnessing the information contained in such data and tools for effectively communicating big data issues and results. The 105th annual meeting encourages contributions that address these issues or that employ novel and integrative approaches to harnessing the data revolution to address pressing issues in ecology.
Description: Fuelcasting is a new program that provides projections of expected fuel conditions this grazing season. It is an important component of the Rangeland Production Monitoring System. he 30-minute webinar provides an overview of the system, demonstrates how to download and use the data, and discusses the 2020 fuel outlook with a focus on hotspots.
Presenter: Matt Reeves, USFS RMRS scientist
View article.
Since the mid-1800s pinyon-juniper (PJ) woodlands have been encroaching into sagebrush-steppe shrublands and grasslands such that they now comprise 40% of the total forest and woodland area of the Intermountain West of the United States. More recently, PJ ecosystems in select areas have experienced dramatic reductions in area and biomass due to extreme drought, wildfire, and management. Due to the vast area of PJ ecosystems, tracking these changes in woodland tree cover is essential for understanding their consequences for carbon accounting efforts, as well as ecosystem structure and functioning. Here we present a carbon monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) system for characterizing total aboveground biomass stocks and flux of PJ ecosystems across the Great Basin.
Webinar recording.
Description: Join a panel of practitioners from several realms (governmental, contracting, and non-profit) to learn how they are adapting field work plans to reduce risks to practitioners and community members in the time of COVID 19. As we are all learning and adapting to this strange new world together, we’ll wrap up with time for participants to share their own ideas and ask questions of panelists and each other.
Presenters are the following SER-NW chapter board members:
Jeff Barna an ecologist with a wide-ranging research background focusing on plants and wildlife, as well as wetland and riparian ecology. Jeff currently works for Environmental Science Associates, an employee-owned natural resource management and restoration design company. He has worked throughout the U.S., but is now happily based in the Northwest, and lives in Portland. Jeff is very passionate about engaging young people, particularly those interested in becoming ecologists because of the importance of supporting the next generation of restoration scientists.
Ben Peterson an aquatic weed biologist with the King County Noxious Weed Program in Seattle, WA, where he has worked since 2009. Over the years he has worked on restoration projects with several non-profit, for profit, and government organizations (including an internship with the Aldo Leopold foundation where he got to sleep in The Shack for a week). Ben received a MS from the University of Washington in 2008.
Regina Wandler, Stewardship Manager at Skagit Land Trust, Regina is responsible for monitoring and managing over 8,000 acres of conservation land across Skagit County. She began serving on SERNW’s board in 2015 while completing her Masters in Environmental Horticulture at the University of Washington, and is a Certified Ecological Restoration Practitioner In Training (CERPIT).
View article.
This study reports an automated method of mapping rangeland fractional component cover over a large portion of the northern Great Basin, from 1986 to 2016 using a dense Landsat imagery time series. Over the 30‐yr period, shrub cover declined and bare ground increased. While few pixels had >10% cover change, a large majority had at least some change. All fractional components had significant spatial relationships with water year precipitation (WYPRCP), maximum temperature (WYTMAX), and minimum temperature (WYTMIN) in all years. Shrub and sagebrush cover in particular respond positively to warming WYTMIN, resulting from the largest increases in WYTMIN being in the coolest and wettest areas, and respond negatively to warming WYTMAX because the largest increases in WYTMAX are in the warmest and driest areas. The trade‐off of lowering temporal density against removing cloud‐contaminated years is justified as temporal density appears to have only a modest impact on trends and climate relationships until n ≤ 6, but multi‐year gaps are proportionally more influential. Gradual change analysis is likely to be less sensitive to n than abrupt change. These data can be used to answer critical questions regarding the influence of climate change and the suitability of management practices.
Access the report.
This report is part of an ongoing process of annual monitoring. It describes current conditions but is not an analysis or a description of a change of conditions. Although annual reports were produced for the years 2016 and 2017, the 2019 report also includes information from 2018. The 2019 report shows that:
- FS projects improved habitat for sage-grouse on nearly 480,000 acres from 2016-2019.
- Fires burned approximately 260,000 acres of greater sage-grouse habitat on National Forest System lands in 2016-2019.
- Data on habitat degradation are available from 2015-2018, and cumulative anthropogenic disturbance was at 0.03% on greater sage-grouse biologically significant units.
- Greater sage-grouse numbers in western states continue to cycle and are currently within the natural range of variability.
Access article.
Rangelands comprise a large component of the terrestrial land surface and provide critical ecosystem services, but they are degrading rapidly. Long-term rangeland monitoring with detailed, nonsubjective, quantitative observations can be expensive and difficult to maintain over time. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide an alternative means to gather unbiased and consistent datasets with similar details to field-based monitoring data. Comparing summer 2017 UAV images with long-term plot measurements, we demonstrate that rangeland vegetation cover changes can be accurately quantified and estimate an increase in total absolute shrub/subshrub cover from 34% in 1935 to N 80% in 2017 in central Arizona.We recommend UAV image-based rangeland monitoring for land managers interested in a few specific and dominant species, such as the foundation species, indicator species, or invasive species that require targeted monitoring. Land managers can identify and continuously monitor trends in rangeland condition, health, and degradation related to specific land use policies and management strategies.
Poor air quality arising from prescribed and wildfire smoke emissions poses threats to human health and therefore must be taken into account for the planning and implementation of prescribed burns for reducing contemporary fuel loading and other management goals. To better understand how smoke properties vary as a function of fuel beds and environmental conditions, we developed and tested a compact portable instrument package that integrates direct air sampling with air quality and meteorology sensing, suitable for in situ data collection within burn units and as a payload on multi-rotor small unmanned aircraft systems (sUASs). This study presents and discusses design specifications for the system and preliminary data collected in controlled burns at Tall Timbers Research Station, FL, USA and Sycan Marsh Preserve, OR, USA.
Access podcasts from Washington State University
The Art of Range podcast provides education through conversation with some of the brightest minds in rangeland management. We interview researchers, ranchers, and resource professionals to bring you extended discussion on topics that are of interest to all. A new episode will be released every two weeks, with several episodes on a general topic area. This podcasting project is funded by a grant from the Western Center for Risk Management and has specific learning objectives which will drive the topics list.
If you are a Certified Professional in Range Management through the SRM, you may claim continuing education units for these episodes (.5 or 1 CEU per episode) by following the instructions at the conclusion of the survey.