Assessment and Comparison of Different Methods for Estimating Forage Production (Case Study: Rangeland of Kurdistan Province)
Authors
Abstract
Today, in the rangeland management science and determination of range
capacity, accurate and true information about range production is crucial. In fact, range
production is considered as a basis for range management. The aim of this study was to
compare different methods for the estimation of forage production with four sampling
methods in the rangelands of Kurdistan province, Iran. The sampling methods were
Adelaide technique, double sampling, estimating method, clipping and weighting method
(control). A two-way analysis of variance was made to compare the methods and
vegetation types. The estimating methods and plant vegetation types were considered as
treatments and blocks, respectively. The results showed that Adelaide method had no
significant difference with control method and was selected as the best method for
estimating the plant production in the rangelands of study area with dominant shrub plants.
A significant difference was obtained between control and estimation methods. Therefore,
this method had lower accuracy for estimating the production of range plants. The results
showed that the composition of range plants was an effective factor on the accuracy of
estimating methods and also paying attention to ecosystem variability was an important
key to achieve a suitable method in order to estimate the range production. A significant
difference was obtained between double sampling method and clipping and weighting
method (control). It was due to various plant combinations of the study area. Therefore, the
double sampling had lower efficiency than clipping and weighting method to estimate
various plant species such as grasses, shrub and herbaceous plants.
