"If something has been disturbed, let's say in a wildfire, and responded poorly with weeds, the same soil and precipitation and basic site factors exist with that site." So, the software is a help for growing back the plants which historically existed in a habitat, as well as a way to pursue habitat restoration, said Phipps, rangeland ecologist with the University of Nevada, Reno.
"It provides a way to sort of map communities of scale, in which we can sort of look at different observations and say, 'OK, these are apples, these are oranges' and get a clearer picture of trends," he said.
"Rather than looking at less resilient sides of the landscape and then blaming that on poor management or looking at high-resilient places on the landscape and blaming that on effective management, we can piece those variables apart easier with this methodology," Phipps said.
"Rangeland vegetation monitoring has historically been incredibly important throughout the West. And right now, we're sort of facing a bit of an affliction or crisis where we don't have the manpower or the funding to do that."
The Bureau of Land Management needs more resource managers to analyze the condition of Nevada's landscapes and develop responsible grazing plans, he noted.
"We currently have several different models that have been published. They're looking at using satellites to measure vegetative cover. And so there's this desire to just want to jump to that technology and say, 'Now we know how much perennial grass or shrubs are on the landscape. And we can just use the satellite images to monitor them' — not knowing what the soil is underneath those plants that govern the actual dynamics," Phipps said.
"So historically, the tool to do that was NRCS-based soil mapping," he said of the Natural Resource Conservation Service platform. "Each county would have the soil survey completed, and those soils would be associated with plant communities called ecological sites. This scale is set up into a larger framework that focuses on disturbance response," that is, how plants will respond to obstacles such as wildfire and vegetation treatments.
"It focuses on soil-specific predictors. So if we don't like the plant community that's there or it doesn't make sense in a larger context, we can sort of place that within, what is the actual potential of this site to grow some of this historical reference vegetation? And what are the steps which follow that, to lead it somewhere else?"
'NEVADA-SPECIFIC ISSUE'
Phipps mentioned how, in 2017, the BLM established the Outcome-Based Grazing Authorization initiative, which helps ranchers adapt to unexpected conditions such as droughts. Five of these authorizations are in Nevada.
"So this is a very Nevada-specific issue. Because there is so much public land grazing with additional flexibility, people like additional accountability. How do we know that we're doing the correct things on these landscapes? There are numerous ranchers and groups in Elko, including the Results Oriented Grazing for Ecological Resilience group, which helped fund this research."
He said that group is full of "producers and individuals who know they can do a better job on the landscape if they have additional flexibility and can work with plant timing and phenology," that is, plants' life cycles and how the seasons and climate affect them.
Oftentimes, ranchers send their livestock out to graze at the same place every spring, "not giving those plants an opportunity to really fully develop," Phipps said.
"With additional flexibility, the producers are able to use the resource more gently and in a way that makes sense with local conditions, precipitation and the actual ecology of the plants and their life cycles. And this tool kind of provides a platform for us to judge or to evaluate, what do we think the potential of this plant community is given the soils and site resources that are there?" he said.
"And we can compare that to the other digital communities in the area and have a better feel for how that remote sensing data actually plays on the ground — versus simply looking at this mosaic of landscapes that are producing different vegetation and not having an understanding of why that's occurring," he said.
"The United States generally has done a very good job of mapping soils across the landscape, producing tools like Web Soil Survey that can be done in most places in the United States. But the Forest Service, for example, has generally not mapped their soil."
Phipps said the software acts as a solution to situations where "we don't have soil mapping tools as a base to even begin this kind of analysis, which is really the fundamental cornerstone of range land ecology and assessment."
"This kind of technology can simply take GIS mapping-derived products and train them across the landscape using observation locations," he explained. "So long as you have existing monitoring data, which most places in pastoral communities do, you can train that into this model, and develop our mapping."
He said the vegetation mapping program was done at the same scale and protection as the Landsat satellite image library.
"So now we can use the Landsat satellite image library to come up with what the different vegetation components are," he said, such as annual grass, perennial grass, shrub cover, bare ground and weather.
"It's meant to be a tool in support of agriculture, sustainable livestock grazing, and a way to show across the country that we can implement these sorts of grazing flexibilities, in a way that's generally enhancing community conditions and resilience throughout these landscapes," Phipps explained.
To read Phipps' research with University of Nevada, Reno, rangeland ecology and management Professor Tamzen Stringham, visit https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S155074242400006X?via%3Dihub.
©2024 Elko Daily Free Press, Nev. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
