Part 6: Choosing Where to Monitor

Distinct Monitoring Areas on Your Ranch

Choosing the correct sites for monitoring is a critical step in this process since these sites become the foundation of your monitoring program. Proper selection of monitoring sites allows you to get the maximum amount of information from a minimum amount of land.

Your goal in deciding where to monitor is to select at least one site from each distinct plant community and ecological site identified on your ranch.

Representative Areas: These are areas that characterize the bulk of the pastures on your ranch. These areas represent management practices for the entire ranch unit. You, of course, are not going to monitor the entire ranch, so you will use the information and data collected from these sites and apply it to the ranch as a whole. In this module we will refer to these as key areas. More information available in this PDF.

Critical Areas: Critical areas are those areas with exceptional resource values or unusual susceptibility to disturbance. These might include riparian areas, habitat areas for threatened or endangered species, visually sensitive areas, wetlands, or areas with highly unstable soils.

Comparison areas: These are areas that have been protected from livestock or wildlife grazing, or from other impacts, and show natural fluctuations in vegetation due to weather or other influences. Because this land is basically “untouched” by grazing, it can be compared to land that has been grazed.

In most situations it will be feasible to monitor a few locations on only a small part of the ranch. You will want to refer to your goals and objectives for monitoring when choosing sites to monitor.