Improving Field-Based Experimental Research to Compliment Contemporary Management

Abstract

season grazing use of individual perennial grasses, such as bluebunch wheatgrass and black grama. We know those identifi ed limits have application to allotment and ranchscale management decisions for maintaining important forage species. Another example would be small-scale work on plant response to fi re. The nature of a fi re may change with scale, but the principles of plant response are consistent across scales. Those small-spatial-scale principles, in a sense, scale up quite effectively. However, there are also cases in which research is diffi cult to scale up. For example, we may know how individual plants respond to grazing, but animal preference and grazing distribution come in to play at larger scales to infl uence plant community response. We may manage to maintain individual species and still shift community structure. We believe this issue of scale deserves much more attention from researchers. There are reasons to be optimistic that we can overcome the obstacles to better integration of management and research. There have been and continue to be plenty of success stories. Some of the newer tools have helped us all gain a better appreciation and description of scale issues (global positioning systems and geographic information systems for example) and our analysis capabilities will only continue to improve. We believe that some of the tools for research on a larger scale will open the door for further collaborations between managers and researchers. We hope that the discussion that follows will 1) point out some of the limitations of traditional fi eld-based research and 2) provide suggestions for some of the approaches that might help us move forward.