Landscape-scale Grazing Experiment
We have partnered with the Natural Communities Coalition and Irvine Ranch Conservancy to understand how conservation grazing using domestic cattle alters the distribution and diversity of plants across heterogeneous landscapes in Orange County, California. Using a combination of landscape-scale manipulation of grazing, plant community monitoring, drone and satellite remote censusing, and seed addition experiments we are asking the following questions:
How do herbivory and disturbance alter spatial processes leading to plant homogenization and redistribution across the landscape?
How does grazing-induced heterogeneity alter the spatial-scaling of plant diversity-productivity relationships?
How does species pool functional diversity alter invasion and reassembly of plant communities and seed banks?
How do management actions and phenology interact to promote the recovery of native plant communities?
