Lentic systems scattered across Northern Nevada offer windows of opportunity for an ecosystem to make best use of its limiting resource: water. Compared to the surrounding landscape, these wet meadows have much higher plant productivity rates which capture sediment, reduce overland flow energy, and prevent excessive erosion.� This productivity also attracts grazing animals.� Large grazing species such as cattle and wild horses particularly prefer lentic and lotic riparian areas and will spend a disproportionate amount of their time within them.� If over-used, a meadow loses the stabilizing plant community necessary to prevent erosion, causing a meadow to degrade.� This study is working to quantify the hydrologic response to cattle versus wild horse use of 12 lentic meadow sites across Northern Nevada.� Trail cameras set to 5-minute intervals give a clear picture of which species use a meadow and when. � Camera data are combined with field surveys of vegetation species composition, stubble height measurements, and topographic survey data across meadow transects.� We are using this data to detect how different grazing timing and duration between cattle and horses affects the community structure of stabilizing vegetation.� We are then investigating the erosional response to stabilizing vegetation loss � particularly if lentic systems develop a thalweg, or channelized flow, that will increase shear stress and incision rates.� This incision transports water quickly down-drainage, lowering water tables and shrinking meadow size.� Meadow loss reduces important forage for grazing animals, threatens habitat for important conservation species such as the greater sage grouse, and reduces the hydrologic functionality of a drainage � making it more prone to destructive flows.� It is therefore important to understand how these major grazing species affect Northern Nevada�s lentic areas.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.