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Abstract
Using GIS to Assess Grazing Livestock Capacity on Public Lands
Track: Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries Management
Author(s): James Catlin
Livestock grazing on BLM lands has a long history in the West. For more than half a century, BLM has been charged with managing the number of livestock that graze on public lands for sustained yield. This policy has evolved today to manage grazing in deference to the needs of ecological health. Range monitoring and analysis have also changed over the years and, in the process, BLM has collected decades of range data.
In the past decades, GIS has emerged in BLM to play a major role in land use planning and management. But surprisingly, BLM generally has not used GIS to analyze the amount of livestock grazing that is consistent with BLMs standards for rangeland health.
Recently, the Natural Resources Conservation Service is creating soil maps using GIS. These maps create polygons that represent categories of soil each with a specific potential natural plant community. Using current field data and these soil maps, the project suggests that GIS has the ability to assess the amount of forage that might be expected in an allotment.
Based on the ecological needs of a specific area and recent field forage surveys, the analysis will estimate what part of that forage amount might be available for livestock and still retain vegetation required to meet the needs for plant community health and wildlife requirements.
To demonstrate the GIS forage capacity analysis, the project's method will be applied to a case study for an allotment in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The grazing capacity analysis method is still evolving but is expected to be an important GIS analysis tool to land managers, those who graze livestock, and others in the conservation community.
James Catlin
Wild Utah Project
68 S. Main Street
Suite 400
Salt Lake City , UT 84101
USA
Phone: (801) 328-3550
E-mail: wup@xmission.com