Monitoring
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.
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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.
View webinar recording.
Join this webinar and robust discussion about innovative collaborations and case studies developed through a partnership between Trout Unlimited and the Forest Service. We will share examples of successful projects, tools such as partnership agreements, and how this model of volunteer monitoring can be expanded across other resource areas and throughout the nation to connect communities to their public lands and waters.
Projects and tools include:
- Stream Restoration Collaboration
- Angler Science
- Trout Unlimited’s Citizen Science Framework
- TU and USFS Master Agreement
- Forest Service Citizen Science Toolkit and Fund
With remarks from Trout Unlimited and Forest Service leadership:
Keith Curley, Vice President for Eastern Conservation, Trout Unlimited
Chris French, Deputy Chief for National Forest System, USDA Forest Service
Access site.
ALERTWildfire is a consortium of three universities — The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), University of California San Diego (UCSD), and the University of Oregon (UO) — providing access to state-of-the-art Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) fire cameras and associated tools to help firefighters and first responders: (1) discover/locate/confirm fire ignition, (2) quickly scale fire resources up or down appropriately, (3) monitor fire behavior through containment, (4) during firestorms, help evacuations through enhanced situational awareness, and (5) ensure contained fires are monitored appropriately through their demise.
View guide.
Long-term vegetation dynamics across public rangelands in the western United States are not well understood because of the lack of large-scale, readily available historic datasets. The Bureau of Land Management’s Soil-Vegetation Inventory Method (SVIM) program was implemented between 1977 and 1983 across 14 western states, but the data have not been easily accessible. This guide introduces the SVIM vegetation cover dataset in a georeferenced, digital format; summarizes how the data were collected; and discuss potential limitations and biases. It demonstrates how SVIM data can be compared with contemporary monitoring datasets to quantify changes in vegetation associated with wildfire and the abundance of exotic invasive species. Specifically, it compares SVIM vegetation cover data with cover data collected by BLM’s Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) program (2011–2016) in a focal area in the northern Great Basin. Comparisons between historic SVIM data and recent AIM data documented significant declines in the occupancy and cover of native shrubs and native perennial forbs, and a significant increase in exotic annual forbs. Our study demonstrates that SVIM data will be an important resource for researchers interested in quantifying vegetation change through time across public rangelands in the western United States.
View the handbook.
The Nevada Rangeland Monitoring Handbook has been designed to provide a clear overview of the complex and often confusing world of rangeland monitoring. Included are a suite of short- and long-term monitoring methods.