[APWG] 100-pace Toe-point wins, measured cover in one minute, five seconds.

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne,

Thanks for your email.

Simple is good, and always better than none at all. We are not gathering
data for a PhD thesis or to publish in a peer reviewed journal--just to
open the door a crack and check on the kids once a year, like any good
baby sitter should.

You will have to explain how gathering vegetation ANY cover data, using a
published method like the Evans and Love Toe-point (1957), can ever be so
misleading that it could be worse than not having any data at all?

I think if you try the 100-pace Evans & Love Toe point with a dozen people
like we did earlier this year, and everyone comes up with the same results
no matter how we individually ran the transects though the grassland, you
would agree that it is an acceptable monitoring method.

And you will love the speed of running the 100-pace, too.   We compared
the Toe-point to a traditional method using a measuring tape, which took
about 30-40 minutes, and I was able to do the 100-pace Toe-point in one
minute and five seconds.   For any vegetation monitoring method, that
could be a World Record?

Public grasslands and wildflower fields, have tens of thousands of
projects with the potential to damage the resource being done each year, 
like sowing exotic seeds along roadsides,  or sowing exotic seeds after
wildfires on BLM lands, or all of the USFS and BLM cattle and sheep
grazing allotments--these are all individual projects that need yearly
vegetation monitoring.

If you read the USFS and BLM grazing allotment NEPA documents, the current
methods of monitoring our public grasslands is much too complicated, so
that years can pass by before the vegetation cover of an individual
allotment is surveyed.

No data was gathered before and after the five burns set at Russian Ridge
1995-2008.  The 100-pace Evans & Love modified Toe-point, would have saved
400,000 native grass plants and 2.1 million wildflower plants at Russian
Ridge that you can read about at http://www.ecoseeds.com/invent.html.

By not gathering any data, millions of individual native plants died, the
very resource that was supposed to be protecting, and 2.6 million weeds
grew in the ashes of the native plants that were killed.

We have to get away from the Sgt. Schultz (Hogan’s Heroes 1960s TV show)
method of vegetation management of "I see nothing, I know nothing"--where
no data is gathered, or years go by between vegetation monitoring because
current methods are too complicated.

Sincerely,  CraiDremann (650) 325-7333