PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 76: Restoration Ecology I: Grasslands.
Presiding: A Grootjans
Thursday, August 7. 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM, SITCC Meeting Room 101.

Using remote sensing to assess forage dynamics in a California rangeland restoration project.

Butterfield, Scott^*,1, Malmstrom, Carolyn¹, ¹ Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

ABSTRACT- Rangeland restoration projects require information about forage dynamics over large areas. As part of a rangeland restoration project with Audubon-California, we used Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) satellite data to quantify changes in rangeland forage over a three-year period in the Upper Willow Slough Watershed, in Yolo County, California. We calibrated relationships between green biomass values and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) using a field spectroradiometer and a series of vegetation harvests. The biomass-NDVI relationships were then used to produce time series maps of forage for the watershed from ETM+ imagery. The time series of forage values reveal rangeland responses to different management techniques, including prescribed burns, prescribed grazing, and reseeding of native grasses. An important aim of this project is to facilitate improved management decision-making by the private landowners in the watershed. The initial reaction of most landowners to the satellite-based forage maps was that the maps had to be wrong. After evaluating the maps carefully, however, each landowner changed his or her mind and began to ask for more information about the forage dynamics in each of their pastures. Remote sensing offers a powerful tool to enable voluntary improvements in management of rangelands by private landowners.

Key words: rangeland, forage dynamics, restoration, remote sensing