Historical Works of California Native Grasses and Grassland Management
Dedicated to Arthur Sampson, Father of California Rangeland Management
View the archive
Research and appreciation of California's native grasses and grasslands has been a long time coming. The earliest work on native grasses was on the natural revegetation of depleted or overgrazed mountain meadows and rangeland of the west, by Arthur Sampson. Sampson wrote several reports for the U.S. Forest Service under the guidance of Gifford Pinchot in the early 1900s. Soon after these publications, Sampson became an Associate Professor of Forestry and Plant Ecology at U.C. Berkeley.
In 1919, Sampson wrote Plant Succession in Relation to Range Management, a classic "Clementian" analysis of native perennial grasses and forbs, filled with scale illustrations of their root system profiles. In 1923, Sampson wrote one of the first textbooks on western range management, Range and Pasture Management, followed in 1923 by one of the first texts on native forage plants, Native American Forage Plants. Sampson wrote his classic text in range management in 1952: Range Management Principles and Practices.
In the 1930s, Sampson contributed to several research papers in Hilgardia, published by California's first Agricultural Experiment Station at Oxford Tract in Berkeley. One of Hilgardia's most famous issues, Distribution of the Native Grasses of California, was written in 1947 by Alan Beetle, professor of Agronomy in the Experiment Station and one of Sampson's close colleagues. Sampson continued to write many articles, bulletins, and circulars for the budding Agricultural Experiment Station, which evolved into the California Agricultural Extension Service.
More focused research on California native grasses and grassland management did not appear until the mid 1940s, starting with the research of Merton Love, Burle Jones, and others centered at the U.C. Extension in Davis, California. Today, the articles and circulars of this era are difficult to find and reside in only a handful of libraries in the state.
The work on California native grasses begun in the 1940s and 50s was basically usurped by attention to introduced perennial grasses with emphasis on forage production and range fertilization in the 1960s and '70s. By this time, California's grassland was firmly considered an annual grassland, and native perennial grasses were given scant attention.
The first publication devoted to native grasses appeared in the April 1981 issue of the California Native Plant Society's journal, Fremontia. Interest in California's native grasses gradually increased in the 1980s, finally giving birth in 1991 to the California Native Grass Association (its original name). Native perennial grasses that were once produced in the 1940s did not return into production until almost fifty years later.
This bibliography charts important research and papers on California's native grasses and grassland management from the earliest papers by Sampson to the present. As an educational service to our membership, CNGA is reproducing many of the earlier, historical out-of-print articles and papers in the format in which they were originally written. Gradually, the bibliography will expand, as will the number of reproduced papers, presenting important earlier papers as well as recent papers devoted to California native grasses and grassland management.
