Many vegetation monitoring techniques are often not applicable in extremely dry environments due to low vegetation cover. Typical quadrat and point sampling methods for plant frequency and cover can be problematic in areas with low vegetative cover as they require large quadrat sizes and/or large sample sizes. In arid regions of western Arizona, belt-density and line-intercept cover transects are being used to collect long term trend data for grazing allotments. Belt transects are well suited for sampling density of woody species which dominate these dry environments. Line-intercept transects work well for sampling cover in ecosystems with 5-40% canopy cover which is representative of southwestern Arizona. For trend monitoring, 300ft by 100ft macroplots are established throughout grazing allotments. Sampling of each macroplot is conducted along ten randomly positioned transects. In general, these methods can be applicable to ecosystems with widely scattered vegetation or disturbed areas with low canopy cover.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.