Project Number: 5360-21630-001-02
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Sep 01, 2011
End Date: Sep 30, 2013

Objective:
The objective of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of prescribed grazing to enhance ecological conditions in Sierra Nevada meadows. Improving ecological condition is a primary goal of prescribed grazing, yet there is limited research based information about ecological response to prescribed grazing applied at the management scale. This project makes use of an existing dataset to address this information need.

Approach:
Meadow ecological condition data collected over the past 15 years by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) from National Forests in the Sierra Nevada will be provided to the cooperating scientist at University of California Davis (UCD). The UCD cooperator will collaborate with USFS and USDA Argicultural Research Service (ARS), Burns, Oregon to conduct statistical analysis of this data to determine trends in ecological condition. The UCD cooperator will collaborate with USFS and ARS to quantify and describe grazing management on a sub-set of the meadows over the past 50 years, and collaborate with USFS and ARS to correlate meadow grazing management to the trends in meadow condition. The UCD cooperator will also collaborate with ARS and USFS on a sub-set of meadows to investigate the use of remote sensing to determine trend in meadow condition using the 15 years of ecological condition data as ground verification.