APPLICATIONS 



The "proof of the pudding" principle ap- 

 plies with full validity to research; but here the 

 "proof" is in the use or application. Results 

 of much of the research at Great Basin are 

 now in use or have been used for many years; 

 but it is virtually impossible to document de- 

 tails or specific instances of adoption of indi- 

 vidual results. It is certain that research pi- 

 oneered and carried out on, or headquartered 

 at, the Great Basin Station has touched every 

 aspect of range management. Early work 

 proved conclusively the relationship between 

 overgrazing and depletion of the vegetal cover 

 and destructive flooding. McCarty's work on 

 food storage cycles of plants was the first re- 

 search to provide a scientific basis for manage- 

 ment and utilization of forage plants. Ellison's 

 work on condition and trend criteria was quick- 

 ly incorporated into National Forest Ad- 

 ministration range allotment analysis proce- 

 dures and is the basis for many criteria in use 

 today by many land management agencies. 

 Seeding work done by Plummer, both on high 

 mountain areas and in lower oakbrush and 

 pinyon-juniper areas, has provided informa- 

 tion on adapted species that has been widely 

 used by all land management agencies in their 

 revegetation work. 



The principle of deferred-and-rotational 

 grazing, developed and advocated by Samp- 

 son, Forsling, and numerous successors has 

 been a subject for continuing study and re- 



finement. Many recent studies of deferred and 

 rotation grazing have been made at Forest and 

 Range Experiment Stations throughout the 

 West. These practices have proved useful, and 

 numerous variations have been made to the 

 original systems; but there is no way of know- 

 ing how many range managers use them in 

 any form, much less how they learned about 

 them. Rest-rotation grazing (Hormay and Tal- 

 bot 1961), modifications of which are so 

 widely being put into practice now on public 

 and private ranges, is but a variation of the de- 

 ferred- and rotation-grazing schemes devel- 

 oped by Sampson. 



The ideas of the possibility of and neces- 

 sity for management of rangeland were 

 spreading about the time the Utah Experi- 

 ment Station was established. Land-grant col- 

 leges began by giving single courses in the sub- 

 ject; as more needs became evident and more 

 information was developed, the number of 

 courses increased, and what had been one 

 man's specialty became a department; of 

 course the ultimate development has been 

 that both bachelor and graduate degrees have 

 evolved, with range management as a major 

 program. Utah Agricultural College (now 

 Utah State University) offered its first course 

 in range management in 1914 and established 

 a curriculum in it in 1928. Montana State 

 University offered its first course in range 

 management in 1915, and Colorado Agricul- 

 tural and Mechanical College followed in 

 1916. Courses in range at the University of 

 Idaho and the Oregon State Agricultural Col- 

 lege were taught first in 1917. Washington 

 State College followed in 1919; University of 

 California offered its first course in range in 

 1920 but did not establish a curriculum in it 

 until 1953. The succession of years when 

 courses were first offered reveals clearly that 

 the idea of training young men in this subject 

 had caught on. 



Sampson's prolific writing about range 

 management and related subjects continued 

 after he left the Great Basin Station to teach 

 at the University of California. Within a few 

 years he published three books that received 

 wide acceptance as textbooks and reference 

 works (Sampson 1923b, 1924, and 1928). 

 These books were based largely on research at 

 the Great Basin Station and they became the 



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