Foothills Fescue Range Plant Community Guide - Sustainable ...

1.0 Introduction and Background
1.1 This guide is an aide to range health assessment
This plant community guide is provided as an essential reference for range health 3
assessment in the Foothills Fescue prairie. Range health assessment (Adams et al. 2003)
is a new approach that builds on the traditional range condition concept that considers
plant community type in relation to site potential, but also adds new indicators of
important natural processes and functions.
Range management strives to protect and enhance the soil and vegetation complex while
maintaining or improving the output of consumable products along with a wide range of
other values and natural functions. Ranchers and resource managers have used the
concept of range condition in Alberta to measure any deterioration that has taken place
within a range plant community due to disturbances, especially those from livestock
grazing. Range condition has been rated in relation to a concept of site potential or
climax vegetation. The first stocking guide for the Grassland Natural Region The Guide
to Range Condition and Stocking Rates for Alberta Grasslands, was patterned after the
US Department of Agriculture - Soil Conservation Service “range site” concept (Smoliak
et al 1966, Wroe et al 1988). Since the first guide was published, several generations of
ranchers and range resource managers have developed an understanding of range sites
and the ecological conditions that they represent. The new range health tools are
similarly intended for use by range resource managers and ranchers and for a wide
variety of other groups and users that share an interest in healthy rangelands.
Range managers generally strive to maintain plant communities at or near the climax or
potential natural community (PNC) stage in order to provide higher levels of ecological
functioning and to sustain an optimum flow of products like livestock forage. Healthy
range plant communities perform important ecological functions and provide a broader
suite of goods and services than lower seral stages. Early and mid seral stages need to be
present in the landscape to represent the full range of natural variation that existed prior
to European settlement, but should not be predominant.
Our use of the term “range health” instead of “range condition” flags a change in
approach that builds on the traditional range condition approach that considers plant
community type in relation to site potential, but also adds new indicators of important
natural processes and functions, important functions performed by healthy rangelands.
We use the term range health to mean the ability of rangeland to perform certain
ecological functions. These functions include:
• net primary production,
3 The range health approach is being adopted in the United States and Canada by a variety of
agencies and organizations including the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), the US Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land Management (Butler et al 1997, Busby et al 1994, and Task Group on
Unity in Concept and Terminology 1995). The Alberta Rangeland Health Assessment project will provide
new rangeland monitoring tools for Alberta rangelands (Alberta Range Health Task Group 1999).
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