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Abstract
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Today, in range management science and determination range capacity, accurate and true information about range production is crucial. In fact, range production is considered as basis for range management. The aim of this study was to compare different methods of estimation of forage production with four sampling methods in rangelands of Kurdistan province, Iran. The sampling methods were: Adelaide technique, double sampling, estimating method, clipping and weighting method (control). A two-way analysis of variance was made to comparing between methods, vegetation types. The estimating methods and plant vegetation types were considered as treatments and blocks, respectively. The results showed that Adelaide method had no significant difference with control and selected as the best method for estimating of plant production in rangelands of study area with shrub plants dominantly. A significant difference was obtained between control and estimation method. Therefore, this method had lower accuracy for estimating the range plants production. The results showed that the composition of range plants was an effective factor on the accuracy of estimating methods and also more pay attention to ecosystem variability was an important key for achieve to suitable method in order to estimating range production. The significance difference was obtained between double sampling method and clipping and weighting method (control). It was due to various plant combination of the study area. Therefore, the double sampling had lower efficiency than that clipping and weighting method to estimating various species plant such as grasses, shrub and herbaceous plants.
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