Treesearch

I'm speaking for Will and Jan Holder, who couldn't be here. I happen to be familiar with Will and Jan's company, Ervin's Natural Beef, and its program because I've sold them cattle. Will and Jan's value-added beef program is based on their family ranch in the area known as The Blue, in the mountains of eastern Arizona.

The importance of coarse wood to aquatic biota and stream channel structure is widely recognized, yet characterizations of large-scale patterns in coarse wood dimensions and loads are rare. To address these issues, we censused instream coarse wood ( 2 m long and 10 cm minimum diameter) and sampled riparian coarse wood and channel characteristics in and along 13 streams in western Montana. Instream coarse wood tended to be shorter but of larger diameter than riparian pieces, presumably because of fluvial processing. Instream coarse wood also displayed highly variable spatial patterns.Most...

Characterization of forest ecosystems structure must be based on quantitative indices that allow objective analysis of human influences or natural succession processes. The objective of this paper is the compilation of diverse quantitative variables to describe structural attributes from the arboreal stratum of the ecosystem, as well as different methods of forest inventory to obtain such indices.For the evaluation of the species structure the indices of Shannon H’ and species profile A, segregation S of Pielou and the species mingling index Mi are discussed. The aggregation index R of...

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) does not have a consistent internal program or source of vegetation data to use for strategic level planning, such as in resource management plans. This technical note discusses and evaluates the potential of the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program to assist the BLM in filling this data gap. The FIA program is the Forest Service's national program for collecting and reporting information on status and trends in forested ecosystems. The FIA is considered here because it is the only standard, nationwide, systematic assessment of...

Kazak nomads were seasonally mobile in the pre-Soviet period, in response to climate variability and landscape heterogeneity. The scale of these movements was interrupted during the Soviet period, but some degree of mobility remained. Mobility virtually ceased in the post-Soviet 1990s, but is reemerging as flock numbers rebound from the mid 1990s population crash.The paper presents results from a three-year multidisciplinary study in southeast Kazakstan, from 2000 to 2004. The study areas cover ecological transects of up to 600 km in length, which in some cases are still traversed by...

Flux towers provide temporal quantification of local carbon dynamics at specific sites. The number and distribution of flux towers, however, are generally inadequate to quantify carbon fluxes across a landscape or ecoregion. Thus, scaling up of flux tower measurements through use of algorithms developed from remote sensing and GIS data is needed for spatial extrapolation of carbon fluxes and to identify regional sinks and sources of carbon. Spatial and temporal quantification of carbon dynamics are useful in understanding the biophysical factors that cause regions to be sinks or sources of...

We discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of satellite data for rangeland planning in Central Asia, with our emphasis being on sources of low cost or free data. The availability and use the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) as a base map and tool for coordinated natural resource planning in Central Asia is discussed in detail. Base maps are important in planning projects to help in identifying vegetation types, water sources, areas of concern (for example degraded sites), structures, for description of past and current uses, and the communicati...

Mongolia is a sparsely populated country with over 80 percent of its land used by pastoralists for extensive livestock grazing. Mongolia’s wildlife and pastoralists have faced dramatic challenges with the recent rapid socioeconomic changes. Livestock numbers increased dramatically in the 1990s following the transition from communism to democracy and capitalism. Yet, limited industrialization and cultivation and relatively low rates of natural resources exploitation leave geographically large areas of the nation with few adverse impacts. In addition, the nation’s heritage is strongly...

In this paper I describe processes and impacts of collective action by mobile pastoralist communities, and of external support strategies to strengthen local institutions and cooperation in Mongolia’s southern Gobi. The need for pastoral mobility triggered the processes leading to community organization, and the emergence, or re-emergence, of local informal institutions. Their growing role in natural resource management, conservation, rural self-governance and service delivery, and the onset of self-organization and scaling-up without external input may suggest success in terms of developin...

Grasslands of the Tibetan plateau are commonly believed to be degrading as a result of unsustainable grazing practices. In response, the Grassland Law attempts to allocate grasslands based on the Individual Household Responsibility System model that has worked in the agricultural areas of China. However, the actual tenure scenario in the rangelands of Tibet is not as open access as is commonly implied. Communal forms of pasture tenure and management (including village level and kin-group arrangements) are advantageous given the socio-economic and ecological context. This paper will review...