Assessment

A GRAZING AND RANGELAND STRATEGY

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Goals

There are three goals for the grazing and rangeland strategy:

1. Improve soil and stream-bank stability and aquatic/terrestrial habitats on mountain meadows, upland shrublands, and stream/riparian ecosystems.

2. Prioritize restoration on meadow/riparian systems that are in an upward trend in functionality and on upland shrublands that show resistance to weed invasion and greater abundance of native perennial grasses.

3. Continue adherence to the mission of the California Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program (IHRMP): To maintain, and where possible expand, the acreage of Californias hardwood range resource to provide wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, wood and livestock products, high quality water supply, and aesthetic value.

Possible Solutions

Operationally, the key management element is to ensure that the persons responsible for livestock management are knowledgeable about undesirable impacts and are dedicated to improving conditions. Training will need to be a large part of carrying out this strategy. Frequent monitoring of livestock impacts and rapid solutions are required.
Clearly articulated descriptions of what meadow, riparian, and upland conditions are desired, in proximate and ultimate terms, must be developed. That is, without expecting or proposing the impossible, it must be made clear in ecological and managerial terms the stages (state and transition seral stages and timing) each system can and should go through to achieve two goals concomitantlyincreased ecosystem functionality and increased agricultural productivity.
The rancher/permittee and agency manager would take joint responsibility for understanding and seeking the proximate and ultimate rangeland conditions described. Operationally this task is a large one. Each party would become educated about rangeland ecosystem responses to management and other natural environmental forces, develop tolerance for practical versus technical understanding of ecological and agricultural aspects of range systems, and overcome tensions arising from diverse viewpoints about individual priorities.
Prescriptive and adaptive management could be implemented with an accountable system of ten-year allotment and annual operating plans supported by professional rapport among the rancher/permittee, the agency range manager, and the public at large. At the outset of this strategy, goal 1 seeks to reduce local forage overutilization and associated soil and stream-bank instability and undesirable aquatic/terrestrial habitat impacts on grazing allotments. Overutilization of forage is a temporal event never referencing longer than one growing seasons production; however, it can occur in as short a time as a few days. What goal 1 focuses on is animal distribution control, using such means as herding, salting, fencing, water development to attract animals, and culling of individual unmanageable animals.
Currently, thirteen of fifteen Sierra Nevada counties have adopted or started the process of adopting local hardwood rangeland conservation strategies. Most have adopted voluntary guidelines, which should be continually monitored to measure their efficacy. Optionally, conservation strategies can be incorporated in ordinances or can become part of county general plan policies that govern land use.

Implications

As range managers have become more aware of short- and long-term undesirable impacts of grazing livestock on multiple-use public rangelands, animal management has become more complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Because rangelands are often remote, problem situations that could be easily managed too often go unnoticed for weeks, months, seasons, and sometimes even years.
The rancher may not perceive that problems even exist. What is recognized as a problem changes as understanding and standards change. Ranchers and agency managers would need to be in much closer touch with the resource and each other than they have been in the past.
On some allotments, herder/riders may need to be present much of the time to avoid undesirable impacts; this represents an additional cost to the rancher. One major potential trade-off for this additional management cost for the rancher is the proven increase in productivity possible with time-controlled grazing. Intensive grazing systems pay great dividends in forage productivity enhancement when plants are grazed heavily for a very few days and then have as much as a month to regrow before being grazed again. Such controlled grazing systems should offset some of the added cost of herding.
Using a suite of ecosystem functionality and livestock carrying capacity and performance criteria, trends in many redundant measures will corroborate whether management has been successful. Many of the criteria will be site-specific, but the conditions measured in the SNEP rangeland assessment, including bare soil exposure, width/depth ratios in meadow streams, and abundance of native perennial grasses and weeds, as well as fish and aquatic organism diversity and neotropical bird nesting success should be used. Monitoring (data compilation and analysis) of key associated ecosystem factors needs to be an integral part of this management strategy. The task of reading condition and trend transects is not unreasonable, but it must be done on at least a three-year schedule. Annual monitoring of other short-term indicators will also be a necessary part of the annual operating plan for the ranchers and range managers.