• Editorial: An Introduction to the Special Issue “Ecological Sites for Landscape Management”

  Brown, Joel R.; Bestelmeyer, Brandon T. (Society for Range Management, 2016-12-01)
• Completing the Land Resource Hierarchy

  Salley, Shawn W.; Monger, H. Curtis; Brown, Joel R. (Society for Range Management, 2016-12-01)

  On the Ground • The Land Resource Hierarchy is a useful framework for organizing natural resource information and can provide both insight and explanation while maintaining consistency in terminology, concepts, and interpretations across scales is a challenge. • While some scales of the Land Resource Hierarchy are well developed, with all land area assigned to quantitatively defined groups, other scales lack organizing concepts, relationships, and definitions that allow for testing and revision. • Ecological sites and ecological site groups represent distinct scales in the Land Resource Hierarchy framework, so they should be based on appropriate quantitative variables that can be used to define and communicate their extent and behavior.
• Using Ecological Site Information to Improve Landscape Management for Ecosystem Services

  Brown, Joel R.; Havstad, Kris M. (Society for Range Management, 2016-12-01)

  On the Ground • Ecological sites and their component state-and-transition models are valuable tools for predicting the effects of climatic and management changes on a variety of ecosystem services. • Site-specific information must be able to be both refined to finer scales to account for spatiotemporal variability within a mapped site and expanded to include interactions with other sites in the landscape to identify priorities and account for integrative disturbances and ecosystem services such as wildlife habitat, hydrology, fire, insect outbreak and invasive species. • Ecological site groups, spatially contiguous and behaviorally similar, are an important level in the land hierarchy to organize and interpret information.
• The Role of Data and Inference in the Development and Application of Ecological Site Concepts and State-and-Transition Models

  Karl, Jason W.; Talbot, Curtis J. (Society for Range Management, 2016-12-01)

  On the Ground • Information embodied in ecological site descriptions and their state-and-transition models is crucial to effective land management, and as such is needed now. • There is not time (or money) to employ a traditional research-based approach (i.e., inductive/deductive, hypothesis driven inference) to address the unknowns in developing and documenting ecological site concepts. • We propose that the development of ecological site products is a dynamic task of defining concepts and processes that best explain the available data (i.e., abductive reasoning), and as such a more iterative approach to their development is needed than is currently used. • Under the proposed approach, ecological site concepts are never viewed as final but only the best representation that is supported by available knowledge and data. • The natural result of this way of thinking is that products like ecological site descriptions and state-and-transition models should continually be tested and improved as new data become available.
• Improving the Effectiveness of Ecological Site Descriptions: General State-and-Transition Models and the Ecosystem Dynamics Interpretive Tool (EDIT)

  Bestelmeyer, Brandon T.; Williamson, Jeb C.; Talbot, Curtis J.; Cates, Greg W.; Duniway, Michael C.; Brown, Joel R. (Society for Range Management, 2016-12-01)

  On the Ground • State-and-transition models (STMs) are useful tools for management, but they can be difficult to use and have limited content. • STMs created for groups of related ecological sites could simplify and improve their utility. The amount of information linked to models can be increased using tables that communicate management interpretations and important within-group variability. • We created a new web-based information system (the Ecosystem Dynamics Interpretive Tool) to house STMs, associated tabular information, and other ecological site data and descriptors. • Fewer, more informative, better organized, and easily accessible STMs should increase the accessibility of science information.

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