Location: Range Management Research
Title: Monitoring can be more than an expensive rain gaugeAuthor
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Submitted to: Popular Publication
Publication Type: Popular Publication Publication Acceptance Date: 10/31/2018 Publication Date: 11/1/2018 Citation: Bestelmeyer, B.T. 2018. Monitoring can be more than an expensive rain gauge. Malpai Newsletter, Malpai Borderlands Group, November 2018. pg. 4. Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: Monitoring ican detect trends in vegetation that should be important to land managers. Careful measurement is needed because gradual vegetation trends are otherwise difficult to perceive accurately. Yet monitoring results are often unsatisfying. The data are expensive to gather and analyze. The results often reflect the overriding influence of annual weather on rangeland vegetation. This has led to the infamous assertion that monitoring is “an expensive rain gauge”, since monitoring data teach us little more than what we learn from cumulative rainfall—that it was a wet year or a dry year. |
