Los Planes watershed vegetation monitoring: Standard operating procedures

This is a description of survey procedures for short term vegetation monitoring at Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Stream (NIDS) structure sites and control sites a ranch in the Los Planes, La Paz, Baja California Sur. This study design was modified from USGS Short Term Vegetation Response Study (Wilson et al. 2021) with the goal to quantify changes in species abundance/cover, structure, and composition. The Society of Ecological Restoration identifies 3 major ecosystem attributes of importance when assessing restoration projects, such as the installation of NIDS (Society for Ecological Restoration International Science & Policy Working Group 2004; Ruiz-Jaen and Mitchell Aide 2005). These attributes are vegetation structure, diversity, and ecological processes. Our protocol can be used to directly quantify vegetation structure and diversity and by collecting data over several years we can indirectly assess the ecohydrological processes associated with NIDS (Norman, Lal, et al. 2022).