Salinity and Sodicity

Activity – Clip Plots

Clip plots can help you understand how much biomass is present in a particular area. Before you get started on this activity, consider the following questions, based on your interests and concerns, and jot down some notes.

Supplies

• A 1 square meter quadrat or a hula hoop (that is, something to denote an area of known size that you can lay on the ground)

• Clippers for clipping vegetation

• Paper bags for collecting clipped vegetation. Remember to label the bags with enough information to identify the sample, for example, initials of the person doing the clipping, the date, and information about the location of the site.

• Scale

• What should be the total area of your sample?

• How will you decide where to sample? (See “Soil monitoring” on page 80, for more guidance.)

• Will plants be clipped and separated by species, functional group (cool season grass vs. annual forb), or other characteristic(s)?

• Will total biomass be collected, or will you separate green/active components from standing litter?

• When will you be sampling and how will this affect the amount of biomass you will collect?

Instruction

1. Place your quadrat in a location where you would like to know the quantity of plant biomass per area.

2. With a pair of clippers, remove all of the vegetation within the quadrat to ground level, and place it in a paper bag.

3. Clip enough quadrats to capture the variation in biomass across the landscape of interest. The more variation there is, the more plots will need to be clipped.

4. Dry each bag of vegetation.

5. Remove vegetation from each bag and weigh it separately.