Livestock Surface Water Risk & Forage Assessment for BC Range

Livestock Surface Water Risk & Forage Assessment for BC Range

Sufficient and high-quality water is essential for sustainable livestock production on Crown Range in British Columbia. This webinar series introduced a method for assessing the climate change risks to surface water sources, and explained how to apply this process to water and range use management and planning across BC.

The method uses future evaporation, climate moisture deficit and the flow accumulation model to evaluate future water reliability. Combining this process with forage resource data and other key rangeland characteristics allows you to plan for how climate change will affect water accessibility in areas with high value forage resources.

Content in the training videos covers:

 ✔ Tools and approaches for assessing risk to surface water

✔ Application of risk assessment to water development considerations

✔ An overview of three pilot projects that have applied the risk assessment and planning process to water developments on Crown Range in the Cariboo Region

Tools to Assess Climate Change Risk to Water Availability

This session includes:

  • An overview of the climate model
  • Key findings from the Cariboo Livestock Surface Water Risk Assessment project
  • An overview of the Forage and Water Resiliency Map Set that is available for range units within British Columbia
  • A how-to on mapping the risk of climate change to surface water and the forage resource
  • A how-to on accessing map layers using ArcGIS, Google Earth, and QGIS provided by Darin Brooks

Identifying Closed vs. Connected Water Resources and Zones of Use

This session includes:

  • A review of evaporation maps and climate scenarios
  • Discussion on the difference between open and closed basin wetlands
  • How to use the relationship of a ponds surface area and volume to predict risk
  • Discussion of the current model assumptions
  • An introduction to the Flow Accumulation Model by Darin Brooks
  • How to predict open and closed basin wetlands

Planning a Water Development

This session includes:

  • Range management planning
  • How to link the forage resource with resilient water bodies
  • How to predict zones of use based on distance to water and forage mapping
  • A forage calculation spreadsheet to estimate available forage
  • Examples of potential uses of the mapping resources – calculating carrying capacity, planning water developments, planning locations for rangeland health assessments

Assessing Water Developments in the Field: Cariboo Pilot Projects

This session includes:

  • An introduction to Cariboo Surface Water Risk Assessment Pilot Projects
  • A virtual tour of the pilot projects from planning to implementation and field evaluations
  • A discussion on producer experiences