An Ecological Site Description (ESD) is a distinct land area described with specific soil and physical characteristics that are products of landform, topography, climate, and elevation which will support an association of plant species. Federal, state and private land managers use ESD�s to help identify ecological potential of a site for specific plant community state and transition responses. The current hydrological information in ESD�s is incomplete or lacking. Providing a hydrologic assessment to complement existing Ecological Site Description information of soils, vegetation, climate, and management options will provide land managers a new tool to understand soil-vegetation-erosion-management interactions and responses to conservation practices. A new database, the Agricultural Rangeland Erosion and Salinity Database (ARES), hosted by the USDA National Agricultural Library can be used to assist in developing inputs and validating outputs for models such as the Rangeland Hydrology Erosion Model (RHEM). The outputs from RHEM provides information to assess risks of unsustainable erosion and potential effects from management actions that result in changes in plant lifeform, foliar and ground cover. This information is necessary to create site-specific hydrological assessments to enhance ESD�s which will provide critical hydrologic information on runoff/erosion potential as a function of the plant community. The RHEM outputs provides potential runoff and soil erosion by ecological state and provides estimates from various conservation practices as part of the hydrologic assessment. Utilizing the hydrologic assessment will provide the user the ability to develop sustainable, long term land management monitoring plans. An example of a typical hydrologic assessment for the Shortgrass Prairie ecosystem based on data collected from the USDA-ARS Central Plains Experimental Range near Nunn, Colorado, is presented along with discussion of how it can be used to make informed management decisions with targeted objectives to increase land use sustainability of Shortgrass Prairie plant communities.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.