Rangeland Health Workshop - Breakout Session 2

Updated 06/13/2008

1. What are landscape level rangeland health attributes (threats)?
2. What are the indicators?
3. How do we measure/predict?

Key points presented by group 1:

A major attribute of rangeland health is the stability of the soil component. For this, the indicator would be soil erosion, or the potential for soil erosion. Soil stability is compromised mainly by anthropogenic factors such as livestock grazing, mining or by off-road vehicles. However, fire and catastropic events such as large, intense rainstorms may also acutely compromise rangeland soil stability. A second threat to rangeland health is the fragmentation of vegetation communities. If rangeland management practices result in vegetation communities being fragmented into smaller blocks which are not sustainable, substantial fluxes in vegetational composition may result. This may drive vegetational community changes that impair a land unit's ability to retain soil and water resources, thereby causing the ecosystem to deteriorate. Species composition and diversity are ecosystem attributes that are threatened by deterioration in rangeland health. It is also very important that we link rangeland ecophysiological attributes to social attributes.

The group next addressed the issue of whether rangeland management should be value driven or value free and reached the concensus that inevitably we would manage for current values, but that it was important to maintain options for future values (e.g. as societal needs and perceptions change).

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