###### Abstract  
Rangeland monitoring aims to determine whether grazing management strategies meet the goals of sustainable resource utilization. The development of sustainable grazing management strategies requires an understanding of the manner in which grazing animals utilize available vegetation. In this study, we made use of livestock tracking, in situ observations and Sentinel-2 imagery to make rangeland scale observations of vegetation conditions in a semi-arid environment, to better understand the spatial relationships between vegetation conditions and sheep movement patterns. We hypothesized that sheep graze more selectively under low stocking rates--resulting in localized overgrazing. We also assessed the importance of image spatial resolution, as it was assumed localized effects of grazing will be best explained by higher resolution imagery. The results showed that livestock tend to congregate along drainage lines where soils are deeper. The findings demonstrate how the spatial analysis of remotely sensed data can provide a landscape-scale overview of livestock movement patterns. This study illustrates that high-resolution normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data can be used as a grazing management tool to determine the spatial variability of productive areas across the semi-arid Upper Karoo rangelands and identify preferred grazing areas. Animals: general, vegetation, large  
can be significantly reduced by recurring overgrazing due to high stocking densities in fragile landscapes [6; 7]. The Upper Karoo is characterised by an arid to semi-arid environment with low rainfall and extreme temperatures. Vegetation typically consists of a wide range of species dominated by perennial dwarf shrubs and therefore is known as the Karoo shrublands. Inequality, poverty, and hunger, as well as, unsustainable water supply, remain some of the key challenges that people face living and farming in the Upper Karoo. These challenges are interconnected with the impacts of a changing climate, environmental degradation, and population growth [8]. The incidence of perennial grasses is low, while short-lived grass species typically irrupt in response to rain events [9]. In this fragile ecosystem, it is important to understand how grazing pressures and grazing management strategies can influence vegetation dynamics when developing guiding principles for sustainable rangeland management [10; 11]. Semi-arid environments typically experience high heterogeneity and temporal variability in precipitation, which results in variable vegetation productivity and forage availability [12; 13; 14; 15]. It is critical that land users and managers have a good understanding of how this variability impacts the movement patterns of grazing livestock [1; 12]. Overgrazing is one of the most important causes of rangeland degradation in the Upper Karoo [16; 17]. Degradation results in a loss of biodiversity, a deterioration in rangeland productivity due to an increasing rate of soil erosion, and has a direct influence on the carrying capacity of the rangeland. This ultimately has an impact on the profitability of livestock farming [18; 19; 20; 21]. Monitoring animal behaviour and vegetation attributes, such as species diversity and density, is pivotal to good rangeland management practices and for preventing degradation in semi-arid areas such as the Upper Karoo. Sustainable management intervention strategies can be developed by correlating the grazing patterns of livestock with the available resources [1; 22; 23]. Although remotely sensed data have been used extensively for rangeland monitoring [24; 25; 26; 27], such data have not yet been used to characterize behavioural grazing patterns of livestock in the Upper Karoo.