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f - kO OO'I ~, III IIIIIIIIIIIII III 999 interoffice M E M O RAN D U M to: Bill Carter from: Larry Routten subject: 2/5/97 Meeting with Mountain Coal date: February 6, 1997 Here are my observations of the meeting yesterday with Kathy Welt, Christine Johnston and Mike Savage regarding the West Elk PR vegetation adequacy questions. We discussed questions 7-14 in the 1/15/97 PAR letter. MCC will put the proposed "reference azea" (the pasture) on a map and delete the existing dry meadow reference area. 8. MCC said the pasture where data for historical records is being collected was fenced in July, 1996 shortly after my site visit with Savage and Johnston. During the meeting, Savage mentioned that bindweed accounted for about 5% of the relative cover in the pasture ,based on his 1996 sampling. I suggested that they begin a weed control program. They agreed that was a good idea. I also suggested that they consider implementing a controlled grazing program in the pasture so the grass stand does not become decadent. I suggested that they might graze during years when they do not do vegetation sampling and/or graze during years when sampling is done after the sampling is completed. MCC agreed that this would be a good idea and indicated they would follow up on it. Kathy said the Forest Service had done some studies nearby which indicated that controlled grazing lead to much more robust grass communities than fenced exclosures. She did not know if any of those results have been published. We discussed the matter of how many years of data will be required. I believe we agreed on the following scenario. A. MCC will submit 90 years of precipitation data from the NWS in Paonia. Based on the variability of that data, they will propose a definition of "wet" ,"dry", and "normal" years. Savage proposed to use precipitation data from September through May preceding the growing season to define the wet ,dry and normal years. I said that made sense to me intuitively, but we should do some research on this. I meant to suggest that it would probably make sense to include precipitation which occurred during the growing season when the results of the vegetation sampling are presented but, I forgot to mention this during our meeting. You might want to pass that on to Mike or Christine.