Roadside Revegetation

MONITORING PROCEDURES
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Rectilinear areas – Associated with staging areas and material stockpiles
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Dispersed areas – Associated with planting islands, planting pockets, and clump
plantings
Each of these sampling designs has a set of procedures defining how transects and quadrats
will be laid out. Section 12.8, Sample Size Determination, guides the designer through the
methods for determining how many transects and quadrats to establish.
12.1.3 WHAT IS THE OBJECTIVE BEHIND MONITORING?
There are three basic reasons for statistical monitoring:
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Compliance – Were regulatory standards or project objectives met?
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Treatment differences – Are there differences between revegetation treatments?
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Trends – What degree of change is occurring over time?
Monitoring for most projects will be conducted to determine whether standards were met
(compliance) because this will be of most interest to the reviewing officials. There will be
occasions, however, when it will be helpful to know if different revegetation treatments applied
to the same area resulted in a different vegetative response. There might also be times when
it will be important to know to what degree things have changed over time. It is important to
discern which of these three objectives meet the intent of the monitoring.
This chapter will provide a set of instructions that establish the following:
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Quadrat locations (see Section 12.7, Sampling Area Design)
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Quantity of quadrats to take (see Section 12.8, Sample Size Determination)
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Type of data collection at each quadrat (see Section 12.2, Soil Cover Procedure, Section
12.3, Species Cover Procedure, Section 12.4, Species Presence Procedure, Section 12.5,
Plant Density Procedure, and Section 12.6, Plant Attributes Procedure)
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Type of data analysis to perform (see Section 12.9, Statistical Analysis Using Confidence
Intervals)
12.2 SOIL COVER PROCEDURE
Reestablishing grasses and forbs on disturbed sites is essential for erosion control. In general,
erosion and sediment transport is a function of live or dead cover in contact with the soil
surface. The following soil cover procedures can be used to determine the amount and type
of cover existing on the surface after construction.
The quadrat is the unit of area that is monitored for soil cover. Exact measurements are
based on recording the surface soil attributes at 20 data points within each quadrat. In this
assessment, a grid of 20 data points is placed on the surface of the soil; where each point hits
the surface is where the soil cover attribute is recorded. For instance, the data recorded at
the first quadrat shows that 5 points were rock, 10 points were live plant cover, and 5 points
were soil. The results for that quadrat would be 25 percent rock, 50 percent live plant cover,
and 25 percent bare soil.
Quadrats are read in the field using a fixed frame (see Section 12.2.1, Sampling by Fixed
Frame) or read later in the office from digital pictures of quadrats. A system for taking digital
photographs of the surface, where the photograph itself becomes the quadrat, is described
in Section 12.2.2, Sampling by Digital Camera.
The sampling design for laying out transects and quadrats depends on the shape of the sampling
unit (see Section 12.7, Sampling Area Design). The number of transects and quadrats depends
Roadside Revegetation: An Integrated Approach to Establishing Native Plants and Pollinator Habitat
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