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and is totally prevented at 9.8 or more stems per square meter for stem diameter <br />• class 0-5mm. While these studies document that high shrub densities can discour— <br />age animal use, the amount of reduced use is unknown. Total production could <br />actually be decreased on such lands with a corresponding increase in usable <br />forage as a result of reduced shrub height and density. <br />Besides being difficult to collect and to interpret, production data are <br />costly and time consuming to obtain. For example, in 1980, environmental per— <br />sonnel at Utah International's Trapper Mine near Craig, spent approximately <br />2,000 hours preparing to sample and sampling vegetation from three pre—mining <br />range sites and six reference areas. The costs for this work are presented in <br />Table 1. <br />The cost data show that sampling for plant production cost Trapper Mine <br />approximately $20,000 in 1980, or over 80% of the total vegetal inventory <br />costs. Even more alarming, the inventory costs show that they added more than <br />$125 to the annual cost of reclaiming an acre of which more than $100/acre is <br />n attributable to the production sampling and attendant exclosures. These high <br />• vegetation inventory costs are a result of two factors, i.e the production <br />measurements and the level of statistical accuracy required by regulation. <br />Moreover, they are not one—time only expenses, since, in the future, operators <br />may be required to reconduct such inventories annually in order to determine <br />success or failure of reclamation and to obtain bond release. In fact, since <br />areas must be sampled at least two years before they can be proven to be suc— <br />cessful, and because different reclaimed areas will probably require separate <br />evaluations, an operator's sampling requirements will increase over time. For <br />example, Trapper Mine has four separate pits developed. In the year <br />1992, the mine may be testing reclamation success for all four pits. Since <br />areas must be sampled for two consecutive years, sampling requirements for a <br />given area will overlap with sampling of areas sampled the previous year. The <br />total areas to be sampled then would be as follows: <br />4 pits (sampling commenced in 1991) + 4 pits (sampling com— <br />menced in 1992) + 6 permanent reference areas = 14 areas. <br />• <br />—6— <br />gp <br />