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Establishing A Monitoring Framework To Evaluate Impacts Of Grazing Exclusion And Inform Restoration At Santa Rita Ranch, Annie Booth, Annie Booth
Establishing A Monitoring Framework To Evaluate Impacts Of Grazing Exclusion And Inform Restoration At Santa Rita Ranch, Annie Booth, Annie Booth
Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects
Santa Rita Ranch is a 1,750-acre cattle ranch in Templeton, California, that was privately owned and continuously grazed for the past 70 years. In 2021, The Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo (LCSLO) acquired the property, and in the winter of 2022, they built a fence that bisects the ranch, excluding the cattle from 800 acres to preserve the riparian habitat. The LCSLO is currently defining the ecological baseline for the ranch to inform future management decisions. Given that cattle grazing has many environmental tradeoffs, they wanted to establish a long-term monitoring study to understand how relieving the pressures of …