Engineering Commons^™

Estimated Grass Grazing Removal Rate In A Semiarid Eurasian Steppe Watershed As Influenced By Climate, Xixi Wang, Shohreh Pedram, Tingxi Liu, Ruizhong Gao, Fengling Li, Yanyun Luo

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Grazing removal rate of grasses needs to be determined for various climate conditions to address eco-environmental concerns (e.g., desertification) related to steppe grassland degradation. The conventional approach, which requires survey data on animal species and heads as well as grass consumption per individual animal, is too costly and time-consuming to be applied at a watershed scale. The objective of this study was to present a new approach that can be used to estimate grazing removal rate with no requirement of animal-related data. The application of this new approach was demonstrated in a Eurasian semiarid typical-steppe watershed for an analysis period …