Vegetation condition
Vegetation condition referrs to the practical representation of the
major successional stages of broad plant communities (Parker, 1954) and
is mostly used to determine and assess the management practices and
improvements (Bashari & Smith, 2010). Although, there are several
approaches to determine vegetation condition such as the four-factor
method (Parker, 1954), six-factor method (Dnubenmire, 1959), climax
method (Parker, 1954), frequency method (Fox, 1984), and the Australian
method (DPIF, 2004), the four-factor method is used
frequently/repeatedly in Iran, to determine vegetation condition,
compared to other mentioned methods. However, to overcome the problems
of the four-factor method in arid and semi-arid regions, it was modified
to the six-factor (Mesdaghi, 1998). In the current study, we use a
modified six-factor method that is developed for arid and semi-arid
regions of Western Iran by Faramarzi et al. (2010). This method is based
on four factors including litter frequency (LF), percentage of weighted
palatability classes (WPC), percentage of potential biomass production
(ratio of actual biomass to potential biomass), and percentage of bare
soil (as a measure of soil conservation) (Table 1).
Table 1. The score of different factors for range condition and classes
of range condition scores (adapted from Faramarzi et al., 2010). BS:
bare soil, LF: litter frequency, WPC: weighted palatability classes, BP:
biomass production, RCS: rangeland condition score.