Towards a method of assessing the veld condition of the valley bushveld in the Eastern Cape

Towards visual assessment of succulent valley bushveld

“…The gradient which appears to be dominant within this vegetation is 'history of grazing/browsing intensity', although as one would expect, there are other gradients which affect the succulent valley bushveld (Stuart-Hill et al 1986a). The technique scores sites which have hardly been used by herbivores on one end of the gradient while sites which have been heavily utilized are scored on the other end.…”

“…Assessing the ecological status of the succulent valley bushveld (Stuart-Hill & Danckwcrts 1988) with any of the current objective techniques (Stuart-Hill et al 1986a;StuartHill 1989;Stoltz & Hoffman 1989) is a tedious and timeconsuming process (e.g. one site of 2 ha takes two operators approximately one day).…”

Linking degradation assessment to sustainable land management: A decision support system for Kalahari pastoralists

“…Trollope, 1990). Jordaan et al (1997) evaluated the accuracy of five such techniques, concluding that the ''degradation gradient'' (Mentis, 1983;Stuart-Hill et al, 1986) and ''weighted key species'' (Hardy and Hurt, 1989;Heard et al, 1986) techniques were best suited to southern African rangelands. However, training was still necessary for farmers to use these techniques, and they remained largely in the domain of extension workers (Zacharias, 2003).…”

Changing grazing systems in central north Namibia

“…Plants indicating good grazing should be associated with the environmental variables associated with good grazing and vice versa. Ordination is a standard practice in evaluating grazing condition in southern Africa (Stuart-Hill et al, 1986) although a degradation gradient was not used. Since the samples contained severely grazed and less grazed areas, the species ordination diagram has sufficient variability in grazing condition to allow testing the local condition classes with published data.…”