East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) owns the Mokelumne Watershed surrounding Pardee and Camanche Reservoirs in the central foothills of California with a long history of cattle grazing. Pardee Reservoir provides drinking water for 1.4 million people, making water quality the top priority for the agency.� EBMUD recognizes the value of maintaining grazing to manage the watershed for multiple goals.� With changes in the grazing program to ensure high water quality, EBMUD engaged University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) to develop a new monitoring program that can help provide information on the watershed scale to aid management decisions.� After four years of Residual Dry Matter (RDM) mapping in every pasture, UCCE is transitioning the mapping process to EBMUD staff.� In doing so, UCCE has begun collecting field data using Collector for ArcGIS on an iPad.� Collector speeds data collection and when downloaded to the Cloud, field data is automatically created into maps, saving time and the need for GIS knowledge to create RDM maps.� Using these maps, UCCE has been able to have discussions about management options such as adding offsite water or supplement placement to improve distribution or invasive weed management control with both EBMUD staff and the ranchers.� RDM mapping allows for quick visual for distribution and use of the pasture.� Management changes were implemented in some pastures and can be seen by following year�s RDM maps.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.