Digital charting technique for monitoring rangeland vegetation cover at local scale.

Abstract

Changes in agro-pastoral production systems affect the livelihoods and development of rural communities. Thus it is important for planners and policy makers to be able to document land or ecosystem conditions and trends in relation to managerial actions at specific locations. Quantification of ecosystem parameters that are used for condition and trend assessment has been difficult, time consuming and expensive resulting in very few locations worldwide with detailed records. We report monitoring techniques that can be used at local scales, to speed up the collection, processing and storage of indicators of agro-ecosystem health. By coupling digital photography, differential global positioning systems technologies, information collected with accessory devices and computer software applied in a strict monitoring protocol enabled rapid sampling and recording geographic position (latitude/longitude) of quadrates (1 to 25 m(2)) with vegetation, litter and soil parameters. If vegetative species are visually distinctive, plants can also be identified. Repeated measurements over time at the same locations provide information regarding environmental trend and rate of change. Coupling our local scale measurements with landscape scale remote sensing data such as satellite or high altitude aerial photography, we have a complete picture of vegetation dynamics and system change, which facilitates interpretation. (c) 2010 Friends Science Publishers