Project Overview
Annual Reports
Commodities
- Additional Plants: native plants
- Animals: bovine, sheep
Practices
- Animal Production: mineral supplements, range improvement, grazing - rotational, watering systems
- Crop Production: continuous cropping
- Education and Training: extension, on-farm/ranch research
- Natural Resources/Environment: habitat enhancement, indicators, riverbank protection, wetlands, wildlife
- Production Systems: agroecosystems
Abstract:
Our objective was to identify grazing management to enhance riparian health on meadow streams. We collaborated with 35 ranchers and numerous agencies to survey grazing management and stream macroinvertebrates across grazed and non-grazed meadow streams in California. Results illustrate that active implementation of simple livestock distribution tools, such as herding and salting away from streams, is associated with increased riparian health. Negative riparian impacts attributable to livestock grazing can be overcome with technically simple techniques. Our results also show that stream characteristics such as substrate size must be considered when establishing aquatic habitat based riparian health targets in grazed systems.
Project objectives:
Objective 1: Confirm the potential for site-specific grazing management practices to enhance important riparian health metrics, clearly documenting the potential for sustainable riparian grazing.
Objective 2: Develop a protocol to establish achievable, site-specific expectations for riparian health, which provides grazing managers with riparian health targets.
Objective 3: Extend the riparian grazing management recommendations developed from this work to private and public land grazing managers, as well as to regulatory and natural resources agencies.