Where does grazing collide?

In rangeland and ecological science, grazing is the consumption of living, standing vegetation by herbivores such as cattle, sheep, or wild ungulates. Sampson's 1913 Range improvement by deferred and rotation grazing set out how the timing and rotation of livestock on a range govern whether the plant community recovers or degrades. McNaughton's 1979 Grazing as an optimization process: Grass-ungulate relationships in the Serengeti later argued that moderate grazing can raise a grassland's net production rather than only reduce it. The referent is animals eating growing plants on the land, tracked by stocking and forage, and it has nothing to do with radiation skimming a surface or a viewer skipping across television channels.[1][2]

Unit

One grazing event or grazing regime, scaled by stocking rate and forage removed per unit area

Recovery means

Rested or rotated pasture regrows between grazing periods, and deferred grazing gives plants time to recover

Measured by

Assessed by stocking rate, forage biomass removed, and utilisation of the standing vegetation

In physics and optics, grazing describes radiation that strikes a surface at a very shallow angle, almost parallel to it, so that the angle measured from the surface rather than from the perpendicular is small. Compton's 1923 The total reflexion of X-rays showed that X-rays arriving at such a grazing angle are almost entirely reflected, a result that underlies grazing-incidence mirrors and X-ray telescopes. The quantity of interest is the shallow angle between the incoming beam and the surface, set in degrees or milliradians. This meaning concerns how light or X-rays meet a boundary, and it is unrelated to animals feeding on grass or to restless television viewing.[3]

Unit

A single shallow angle of incidence, measured from the surface in degrees or milliradians

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Determined from the beam geometry and the reflectivity as a function of the grazing angle

In television and media research, grazing is the restless scanning of many channels with a remote control, sampling programmes briefly instead of committing to one. Walker and Bellamy's 1991 Gratifications of grazing: An exploratory study of remote control use studied why viewers do this and what they get from it, treating grazing as a distinct style of watching enabled by the remote and by the abundance of cable channels. The referent is a pattern of human viewing behaviour, counted by channel changes and viewing choices, and it bears no relation to livestock feeding on a pasture or to X-rays skimming a mirror.[4]

Unit

One viewing session characterised by frequent channel changes

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Indexed by channel changes per unit time, channel repertoire, and self-reported remote control use