With a changing global climate and growing demand for water throughout the world, responsible and sustainable land and water resource management practices are becoming increasingly important. The overall goal of this project is to determine a holistic representation of the effects land management practices have in stream temperature and riparian vegetation conditions within a semiarid stream in North Central Oregon. Often land managers are asked to make changes to riparian areas and modify management practices to benefit stream quality. This study was initiated to help analyze the many interactions affecting water temperature changes and whether these suggestions are successful. The study site located on a stream with current and historic high stream temperatures provides a critical platform for studying management of water temperature in semiarid environments. Extensive vegetation inventories were accomplished utilizing riparian channel transects, greenline inventory protocol and randomized comprehensive vegetation record plots. These large vegetation surveys helped understand the influences of red alder water uptake and possible influences on streamflow input and temperature. These vegetation surveys assessed species richness, density, frequency and height of all dominate species present. Onsite ongoing data collection and analysis include transpiration rates, streamflow and meteorological data including; temperature, relative humidity, barometer, rainfall, wind direction and speed data. Stream and ambient thermal data has been collected in over 15 sensors and were further intensified by using Distributed Temperature Sensing Technology (DTS) for two months in the summer. This particular study is part of an overarching project focused on a systems based approach to analyzing climate-vegetation interactions and ecohydrologic processes in arid and semiarid landscapes. Results of this study provide insight on riparian vegetation water consumption in water scarce ecosystems and expected results from this study will enhance base knowledge regarding multiple ecohydrologic interactions that may affect the thermal regime of semiarid riparian corridors in the West.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.