Sierra Nevada mountain meadows are important resources that provide numerous ecosystem services (e.g. water storage, species diversity, and flood mitigation), recreational opportunities, and summer livestock forage. However, livestock grazing has the potential to degrade sensitive riparian habitats and the numerous services they provide. The U.S. Forest Service implemented riparian use standards and guidelines for meadows grazed under public lands grazing permits in the 1990s to better manage livestock so that both production and ecological goals are balanced. At that time, the USFS established long-term plots to monitor the effects of the new standards on meadow plant communities. We have collaborated with the U.S. Forest Service to examine the long-term trends in plant communities in grazed Sierra Nevada mountain meadows under these new standards and guidelines. In addition to the long-term plant community monitoring data and USFS historical grazing records, we have collected meadow-level site-specific livestock utilization data in 57 meadow sites. We will use the plant community data, grazing records, and utilization data to determine whether grazing use best predicts long-term trends in meadow plant community. We expect that grazing use will not be the best predictor for plant community, but that it will be better explained by local factors like climate or site characteristics. This study will provide an evaluation of the U.S. Forest Service riparian standards and guidelines over a long time period and will inform future grazing management practices.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.