[APWG] Toe point survey can categorize a site as to quality

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

Thanks for your email.  First you take a grassland habitat that looks
fairly uniform, like most of the pictures I show at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/WMA.html.

I am hoping that you will be able to go out this spring, and take a fairly
uniform looking grassland area, and do a 33 toe-point paces, and also 50
paces and 100 paces, then do them again but cross the area at a different
angle.

Then match the results with the quality guide that I have put together on
that web page, with 0-25% wildflower and native grass cover is Very poor,
and 26-50%=Poor, etc.  up to 99.5-100%=As Good as it gets.

The only reason why you need more than 33 paces, is when the quality falls
at the border between two quality grades, like the hill at Edgewood I show
on the web page.  Then, I am recommending more paces, to see what side of
the border that the area solidly falls into.

The problem is that most vegetation cover measurements are much too
complicated or time consuming, so NEVER get done, even though the
environmental laws in California (CEQA) requires before-and-after
vegetation monitoring when a public agency does a vegetation management or
weed management project on public lands, or NEPA rules apply if the
project is on Federal lands.

That is what happened at our local Open Space preserve, Russian Ridge,
that had the best non-serpentine wildflowers for 250 miles here in Central
California, when five burns were set over a decade to manage the weeds,
but killed the natives instead---and nobody evolved with the burns did ANY
kind or type of vegetation cover measurements of the before-and-after
burns.

Fortunately, just for fun for the last nine years, I went out and did my
own toe-points, and no matter how crude the method is, my toe-point are
the only records that exists for those years, before and after the burns.

My toe-points clearly show that the weeds massively spread and the natives
were massively killed over that ten year period. So something simple that
can be repeated by anyone in a few minutes each year, is always much
better than the Dark Ages of no data at all.

Try what I am suggesting, with criss-crossing of an area with different
lengths of toe-points, and I think everyone working in grassland habitats
will fall in love with the method, and also love the simple categories of
quality that I am proposing.  I will look forward to hearing about anyone
who goes out and tests this method.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333