California's oak woodland-annual grasslands support an array of ecosystem services. Understanding the relationship between land management options and the supply of multiple ecosystem services is essential to sustainability and conservation of these working-landscapes. Specifically, balancing tradeoffs between agricultural production, invasive plant species, and the maintenance of other ecosystem services will be a key challenge in an already variable and changing climate. Here, we highlight an example framework for understanding multiple ecosystem service provisioning across a managed oak woodland-annual grassland system. We examined soil and vegetation properties indicative of key provisioning, regulating and habitat ecosystem services across an existing gradient of woody management We found clear tradeoffs in management outcomes. Conversion to open grassland (0-9% canopy) generated forage production 2-fold greater than the woodland (50-100% canopy) and 1.5-fold greater than savanna (10-49% canopy) sites. Gains in agricultural productivity were offset by reductions in plant diversity, soil carbon stores, and reduced infiltration rates. The woodland mineral soil surface horizon contained a mean 50.2g C/kg soil, which is nearly 2-fold the concentration measured in the grassland and 1.2-fold more than the savanna. Infiltration rates were 10-fold greater in woodland sites compared to open grassland. Grassland sites were found to be the least diverse; and woodlands exhibited the most diverse, less invaded and native rich plant communities. The savanna supplies intermediate levels of all ecosystem services quantified and highlights a local management opportunity to balance multiple ecosystem service goals. At the landscape scale, maintaining a heterogeneous mosaic of vegetation patches optimizes the benefits of different ecosystem management options-including increased agricultural productivity, maintaining water and nutrient cycling capacity, protecting genetic resources, and enhancing the number of habitat types.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.