By Jorge Andrade and Antonieta Valenzuela

The workshop “Monitoring and Evaluation of Health and Productivity of Rangeland in Natural Protected Areas” was offered from September 2 to 4, 2016 in order to provide methodologies for assessing rangelands.

Jorge Sepúlveda and Juan Antonio Chávez from the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (Inifap, in Spanish) gave this theoretical and practical workshop that was held in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir National Park.

For two days, the workshop provided the tools and methods to evaluate the health and productivity of rangeland, especially in areas within the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir and the Sierra de Juárez, since both are Natural Protected Areas in the category of National Park.

Some topics covered during the workshop included guidance for measuring species diversity, methods to evaluate the availability of pasture for cattle, quantify the amount of food available to livestock by area to make it an affordable practice, among others.

Conservation actions with livestock coexist within the space of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park and the Constitución de 1857 National Park, and the history of both parks is linked to the history of livestock.

Although these are two actions that might appear inconsistent, at Terra Peninsular we believe that both can be carried out in a coordinated manner to ensure the conservation of habitats and sustainable development of this productive activity.

Therefore, this workshop was conceived as an opportunity to include livestock owners in the activities of both protected areas and also to create agreements, this because livestock is a productive activity that has prevailed in these areas for a long time.

Rangelands are areas where cattle grazes, and when these areas are overgrazed, the cattle compact the soil and the land becomes infertile. If a regenerative livestock management is implemented, this can be reversed, restoring vegetation, aquifers, and generally has both economic and environmental benefits.

More than 20 people participated in the workshop, including staff of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park and Constitución de 1857 National Park, as well as staff of Terra Peninsular, and livestock owners from Ejido Bramadero, an area located near the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir.

It is worth mentioning that this project is being funded by JiJi Foundation, and is part of a strategy for conserving priority sites through the inclusion of local actors.