Rangeland Ecology & Management

Get reliable science

UTILIZING PATCH BURN GRAZING AND FLORISTIC QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN THE TEXAS BLACKLAND PRAIRIE.
Author
Siegmund, Timothy M.
Whiteside, Jay
Singhurst, Jason R.
Publisher
Society for Range Management
Publication Year
2016
Body

In February of 2015 first entry prescribed burns were conducted on approximately 70 acres of each of two, 230 acre pastures in Navarro County, TX. These two pastures are classified entirely as Blackland Ecological Sites in which a tallgrass prairie is the reference climax plant community for all represented soil types. Each is managed under a cow-calf one pasture continuous grazing regime for at least the past 15 years. Important to our goals were whether or not introducing frequent fire back to the landscape and beginning a patch burn grazing management system could increase the abundance of climax tall grass species and perennial forbs. Although each pasture contained similar characteristics of soils, vegetation and management, the variable we expected to affect plant community response to patch burn grazing is the differing cattle stocking rates between the two, 10.45 ac/AUE and 7.67 ac/AUE. In order to measure shifts in the plant community composition over time, as well as differences between burned and un-burned portions of the pastures, we used a Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) methodology based on Swink and Wilhelm's (1979,1994) work in the Chicago region and modified for use in the Platte River prairies of Nebraska (Helzer 2012). This methodology uses a plot-wise FQA in which we sampled 100- 1m2 plots in each pasture. Within each plot we recorded all identifiable species within the plot and assigned each species a conservatism score from 0-10. Sampling in this manner can eliminate the subjectivity of vegetative cover scores and estimates. Furthermore, we can assess the frequency of occurrence of various species between plots, years, and pasture as the study continues. July of 2015 was our first sampling season, and we plan to continue sampling in subsequent years. Our first set of data is currently under evaluation.

Language
English
Resource Type
Text
Document Type
Conference Proceedings
Conference Name
SRM Corpus Christi, TX