Cattle trailing and trampling can create rilling in areas of concentrated cattle movement. These rills can convey runoff and pollutants to streams, leading to impacts on water quality and public health. The number of rills at a site has been suggested as an indicator of water erosion and loss of site quality. Thus it is helpful to identify cattle paths in drylands to evaluate the amount of sediment loss from each site. Identification of erosion rills from remote sensing products has proven difficult because these features typically occur at resolutions finer than publicly available aerial or satellite imagery. Additionally, the 10- to 30-meter pixel resolution of digital elevation models (DEMs) is too coarse to discern impacts from rills, which scale at between 5 to 30 cm. We addressed this problem by surveying a commercial livestock grazing site in the Oostanaula watershed in Sweetwater, TN, with both a 532-nm Leica Scanstation C-10 and a 905-nm FARO Focus 3D 330X Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS). We established both control and impacted catchment sites to collect Total Suspended and Dissolved Solids (TSS & TDS). We scanned at 5 locations, registered these scans, and generated a 1-cm resolution digital terrain model (DTM). We used the ratio of the 905-nm to 532-nm intensity scans, a simple ratio vegetation index to discriminate and remove vegetation from bare ground in rills. We delineated the flow paths and flow directions of water in cattle rills and thus detected the preferential flow path of erosion to the catchments, as well as a count of the number of rills in the field. We used freely available aerial photography from the USDA Farm Services in Google Earth to successfully verify the number and location of cattle rills.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.