Foothills Fescue Range Plant Community Guide - Sustainable ...

Carscallen and Greg McAndrews, ASRD, Calgary, Alan Robertson (High Range
Ecological Consultants), Varge Craig (Alta Rangeland Services Ltd.) and Tony Brierley
(Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) have contributed much to the review and
refinement of this document and their assistance is greatly appreciated.
Development of plant community guides for the Grassland Natural Region has been
possible because of large and growing body of high quality vegetation plot data collected
by Range Management program staff and a number of rangeland consultants since 1986
when the Southern Range Inventory project was established, primarily to collect range
plant community information for management planning. These professionals have payed
particular care and attention to accurate plant taxonomy and consistent application of
inventory methods. We wish to acknowledge the high quality of range vegetation
inventory data that has been collected for the Public Lands Division by Kathy and Clare
Tannas (Eastern Slopes Rangeland Seeds, Cremona, AB), Alan Robertson (High Range
Ecological Consultants, Edmonton, AB) and Bryne Weerstra (Biota Consultants,
Cochrane, AB).
Thanks to Dr. Walter Willms and Dr. John Dormaar, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
for their friendship and constant encouragement. Thanks also to Francis Gardner,
Gordon Cartwright and Jack Vandervalk for their years of patient teaching about foothill
grasslands, their many values and management.
Comments on the Second Approximation
The second approximation adds an additional 10 plant communities to the original 20 in
the first approximation. This classification provides an initial plant community guide to
provide basic standards for assessing range health using the new range health assessment
protocol (Adams et. al 2003). The first approximation guides in the Grassland Natural
Region provide plant community information in a similar format to the plant community
guides developed by Willoughby et. al (2003) for Boreal and Rocky Mountain natural
regions thus ensuring a more standardized format province wide.
A new feature of guides in the Grassland Natural Region will be an improved framework
for correlating soils information to range site and plant community. A strength of the
original stocking guide (Smoliak et. al 1966, Wroe et. al 1988) was the use of generic
range sites definitions that allowed users to recognize site potential. The new system
builds on the old framework but provides more objectivity in determining range site.
Recently Thompson and Hansen (2002) have classified riparian and wetland plant
communities in the Grassland Natural Region. The 3 rd approximation of this guide will
integrate their riparian plant community types as a new research project provides soil
correlation guidelines for riparian landscapes in the Grassland Natural Region.
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