[RWG] Grassland survey to confirm future extinction of biome

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

I am shortening the subject line, because my email program sometimes gets
confused by very long subject lines.

Working for a decade in the 1990s and teaching classes on grassland
restoration with the BLM and USFS in nine Western States, I saw that any
monitoring of the hundreds of millions of acres of grazing allotments here
in the West, was a monumental task.

The problem the two agencies were coming up against, was that whatever
monitoring method used, there was always a possibility of the rancher
arguing that method was arbitrary, because the method were in part
subjective.

This has been a major problem in managing grasslands ever since Arthur
“Sammy” Sampson invented grasslands ecology and survey methodologies 100
years ago, in Utah and Colorado in 1912.

However, by measuring 100 grass plants of the same species on a site, and
recording their basal diameters, gives a rangeland manager a much deeper
picture of what the past history was of that species and what the
potential future could be for that particular grassland.

Many of our hundreds of millions of public grazing allotments are huge
contiguous tracts, especially in states like Utah and Nevada--so as long
as the land does not have extreme geography, then the grazing history of a
contiguous allotment is fairly uniform.

Like the hundreds of miles of valleys I drove through Nevada between the
mountain chains, each mile looked like I had cut and pasted in Photoshop,
or looked like the background of a Bullwinkle cartoon that kept repeating
over and over again.

My concern is, when we look at the hundreds of millions of acres of public
Western grasslands, and measure the basal diameters of 100 individuals of
a few species of native grasses--we may find a whole continent worth of
grasslands that stopped  reproducing or producing seedlings many decades
ago.

Then, we need to check what the cause could be that stopped reproduction. 
Did the cattle and sheep eat the seeds before they could ripen and hit the
ground to germinate?

Or is there another possibility like we found in the Great Basin--did the
native grass plants produce viable seeds, and then fell into soil, where
the soil nutrients were below the threshold for seedling survival?

If the last case is the reality, like the pipeline project  at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/good.example.html, then what will it take to bring
the soil nutrient levels back above the seedling survival threshold, to
replace the minerals removed by our grazing animals?

TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION about--How did you determine that "a 100-plant
transect" will, in all cases, provide an optimal/adequate sample? What
size area will this single transect be valid for?

I would approach that question in a different direction.  Without simple
and easy, but non-arbitrary methods to survey our hundreds of millions of
acres of public grasslands on an annual basis, then no look at all can
reasonably  be done by the USFS or BLM managers; or another method might
be used that is in part arbitrary, and that allows the ranchers to argue
that point.

The 100-plant basal measurement could also be very useful for native
grassland-dependent Endangered species, like many butterflies we have here
in California.  It would be a huge paradox if the reason that those
butterflies are Endangered in the first place, could be because the
grassland biome itself is going extinct around them?

That is what I did a painting of at http://www.ecoseeds.com/art2.html No.
38, title is "MURDER AT JASPER RIDGE and BUTTERFLY X...”

What I am suggesting is that we grid out our public grasslands, and do the
100 plant basal diameter measurement every 20 miles in each direction, or
at least one measurement per 7.5 min. USGS quad.  While we are at it, also
get a percentage native grass cover, like I did in the NM grasslands at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/extinct.html.

Once we have some measured data from several grasslands, then we can
compare notes and see if my current suggestion is an optimal/adequate
sample to predict the future extinction of our Western grassland biome,
and what size area each transect would be valid for.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333