## History of Rangeland Monitoring in the U.S.A. > [!Cite]- > West, Neil E. “History of Rangeland Monitoring in the U.S.A.” _Arid Land Research and Management_ 17, no. 4 (January 2003): 495–545. [https://doi.org/10.1080/713936110](https://doi.org/10.1080/713936110). ## Notes %% begin notes %% %% end notes %% %% begin annotations %% ## Annotations | evernote 217.02.16 Monitoring of rangelands in the western USA formally began in the U.S. Forest Service in the 1930s. Other federal land management and advisory agencies did not usually monitor their clients’ public or private rangelands until after World War II. The initial focus was on the portion of vegetation that was livestock forage Attention to soils generally came after World War II. Lack of consistent and comparable monitoring procedures within and between the federal management, advisory, and regulatory agencies has made it impossible to conclude reliably what the overall condition and trends in conditions of our public rangelands are. Many of those now voicing concerns about the ‘‘health’’ of our nation’s rangelands do not realize that this is a topic that has been slowly ‘‘coming to a boil’’ over the past several decades. The trends in science and technology which have been or could be applied to rangeland monitoring have been more dispassionately reviewed in the companion paper (West, 2003) The purpose of monitoring is to document changes in phenomena of interest so that management can be adjusted (adaptive resource management; Friedel & Laycock, 1995; Moir & Block, 2001). Closely related, but different human activities are classification of the land, inventories (surveys), and assessments. Inventories are one time examinations of land characteristics. The purpose of inventories is to provide the bases for management plans. While repeated inventories could be done to allow monitoring of trend, this has been rarely done, mostly because of the differing objectives of inventory and monitoring and the usually higher costs of inventories compared to monitoring. Attributes that are easier and cheaper to enumerate, yet leading indicators of change, are usually chosen as proxies or surrogates for more expensive data. Trend involves judging whether the time series of data obtained from monitoring shows increasing, decreasing, or stable trajectories for a given area over a given time span. Because rangelands, particularly their vegetation, fluctuate in response to climate and herbivory, it is no easy matter to separate the component of vegetational change due to human uses from the influences of climate and herbivory by native or feral animals, what many (Friedel et al., 2000) designate as ‘‘true’’ trend. Condition (or the more or less synonymous ‘‘health’’ or ‘‘integrity,’’ but see West, 2003) is judged by comparison to some real (baseline or initial data) or ideal expectations, also known as reference points, reference areas (Wilson, 1984), or "bench marks’’ (West, 1991). Thus, condition is a concept and interpretation, not a measurement, per se (Smith, 1989). ...assessment involves interpreting inventory and monitoring data in relation to individual, enterprise, institutional, national, or worldwide needs or wishes (objectives) (Malk, 1999). The Western Range Survey Conference of April 24, 1937, reached consensus on how range surveys could uniformly be done on public lands (Inter-Agency Range Survey Committee, 1937; AAA, 1940). Apparently, this was the first and last time such uniformity in procedures was agreed upon. Every action since this period has produced divergences. A few (Ellison et al., 1951; Deming, 1954) began to point out that soil is practically a nonrenewable basic resource that needs its own inventory and monitoring attention. If accelerated soil erosion takes place, new sites are eventually created, and options for the future, including particular vegetation, and thus habitat for all kinds of organisms and levels of human use, are foregone. Rangeland surveys usually involved ocular reconnaissance (AAA, 1940; Pickford, 1940; Stoddart & Smith, 1955) to determine livestock carrying capacities. If monitoring was done, the Deming (1954) two-phase approach was the most commonly used technique. A few selected locations on key areas (Standing, 1938) with either 3_3 or 5_5 foot permanent plots, where plant and soil data were taken, was the usual approach used by the BLM during that period. Thus, all of these congressional acts (Resources Planning Act (RPA, 1974) as ammended by the National Forest Management Act (NFMA, 1976), Soil & Water Resources Conservation Act (RCA, 1977), Federal Lands Policy & Management Act (FLPMA, 1976), Public Rangelands Improvement Act (PRIA, 1978)) called for periodic assessments of the conditions on the nation’s range and other wildlands. NRI uses a stratified, two-stage sampling design (Goebel & George, 1990; Nusser & Goebel, 1997). The stratification is geographic, with sample sites located within every county and parish in the U.S. The primary sampling unit (PSU) is a square plot of 160 acres. There are about 300,000 PSUs which are subsampled with three point samples. Some data come from the entire 160 acre square, other data (including rangeland condition) come from three points. Sampling has taken place every five years from 1982 until 2003 when this process is supposed to take place annually. Summaries are on line (available at http://www.nhg.nrcs.usda.gov/NRI). The field examinations made possible interpretations of the current vegetation against the information in the appropriate range site descriptions. This substitution of space-for-time is called apparent trend (West et al., 1994).While most NRCS practitioners are aware of this issue and try and dissuade clients from inferring cause(s) from this information, others should be aware that space-for-time substitution is an inadequate approach to determine causation of change (Pickett, 1989). Suggestions of how to do this \[collect time series data instead of relying on space-for-time substitutions\] are, however, lacking in the Range and Pasture Handbook (NRCS, 1997). When asked about this, NRCS employees refer them to the Inter-agency Technical Reference-Sampling Vegetation Attributes (BLM, 1996). In the late 1970s, the BLM decided a more comprehensive inventory and monitoring method was needed to supplement their previous weight estimate and ocular reconnaissance approaches. This decision followed loss of a lawsuit on the adequacy of a bureauwide EIS concerning renewal of livestock grazing permits (NRDC vs. Morton, 1974). A court order of 1974 (Challis decision) required 212 separate EISs. SVIM (Soil-Vegetation Inventory Method, a BLM initiative developed in response to the Challis decision that resulted in 'the best data BLM range conservationists have') was suspended before all BLM lands could be inventoried, largely because of high survey costs (about $2.00 per acre) and procedural shortcomings (Menke & Miller, 1984). Because BLM knew they were falling behind in their monitoring efforts, they performed a triage in 1987. Their livestock grazing allotments were divided into three classes: custodial, maintain, or improve. The latter category was to include only those with the greatest problems where annual monitoring would be done. In 1982, BLM began a new, trial approach to break away from the past. This program was the Experimental Stewardship Program (ESP). The trial runs took place in California-Nevada (Modoc-Washoe), Montana (East Pioneer), and Idaho (Challis). The basic idea was to let livestock grazing permittees have more incentive for applying good stewardship (as provided for in PRIA), if conditions improved on these allotments. In 1989, BLM launched another related program called the Vegetation Management Initiative (VMI). Had VMI been effective, it could have validated whether the ESP trials were efficacious. If this had proved to be the case, the new approach could have been applied bureauwide... The reason for this failure was, and remains, that BLM could not get agreement from all concerned parties on what the management objectives for their lands should be. The latest official stance on rangeland monitoring by BLM is its Rangeland Health Standards Handbook (BLM, 2001). This is the result of all the debate generated by Rangeland Reform 1994. All the old problems of mixing inventory and assessment, skipping over actual monitoring, using space-for-time substitutions to deduce cause, arbitrary choices of a few convenient sampling points, and so on, remain. In addition to the impacts of NEPA, the RPA and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) of 1974 have resulted in this agency \[USFS\] recently devoting about 5% of its total budget to monitoring and planning activities (www.daviesando.com=papers). An Army monitoring scheme called the Land Condition Trend Analysis (LCTA) is the monitoring approach under ITAM. LCTA was developed by the Corps of Engineers, beginning in 1984, to better guide base commanders and managers of natural resources on 40 installations (Tazik et al., 1992; Mitchell & Shaw, 1993). Details of LCTA are available: (www.army-utam.com=components=lcta)... In essence, LCTA data are used to support the application of a modified 3-D version of the Universal Soil Loss Equation (Warren et al., 2000). Their metric for land condition is erosion status or the ratio of current estimated soil loss to soil loss tolerance (more detail on the ATTACC protocols can be found at www.armyitam.com). The net result of the LCTA program is that the Army has more monitoring transects per unit area in place than any other federal land management agency. SRM members, however, tend to judge maintenance of soils and vegetation as the primary objectives of land management. This divergence of opinion highlights the philosophical differences extant in various realms of natural resource management. Some still believe in the balance of nature and the possibility of stable ecosystems without humans as part of the system, whereas others point out that evolution and ecological change are omnipresent so that attempts to freeze-frame particular points in time and space eventually put the system at peril. Because of both internal and external concerns about ecosystem ‘‘health’’ on NPS units, a Vital Signs Monitoring (VSM) process is in its design phase at a number of national park units in the West (www.nature.nps.gov=im=index.html). Because Native Americans were not so susceptible as Euro-Americans to the Smokey Bear propaganda, prescribed burning has been continuous on many reservations. This makes some of them valuable reference areas to adjacent USFS, BLM and NPS lands suffering from fire exclusion policies. The Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) was set up to fill this void \[of regional scale data\] in the nation’s monitoring efforts (Messer et al., 1991; Messer, 1992;Breckenridge et al., 1995)...Some (SAB, 1990) became internally disillusioned with the progress of EMAP, and an external review by the National Research Council (NRC, 1994) concluded that the program did not have an adequate theoretical base, which in turn makes the choice of indicators arbitrary. The costs of EMAP also seemed excessive... A very desirable goal, however, is to make all their data publicly available on their website (www.epa.gov=emap) less than two years after it is taken. (See also https://www3.epa.gov/region9/water/wemap/) Livestock grazing is, however, in the terminology favored by EPA, a stressor that shouldn’t be used as a reflection of ecological status (SAB, 2002) because it leads to circular reasoning (tautologies). Instead, only environmental and ecological responses to stressors should be used as indicators to avoid tautologies. It is clear that these reviewers (SAB, 2002) see EPA as becoming the dominant institution in environmental monitoring. The SAB (2002) report in particular, and EPA’s efforts in monitoring generally, deserve greater attention by all those interested in rangelands. At this \[Jornada Experimental Range\] and other ARS locations, several (Hunt et al., 2003) have also begun to make contributions toward improvement of rangeland monitoring using remote sensing. When there are conflicting stories coming to the U.S. Congress from federal agencies, professional organizations, lobbyists, environmentalists, and other constituents, Congress often enlists its own investigative arm, the Comptroller General in the General Accounting Office. When trying to implement ESA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the main action agencies administering ESA, quickly found that all sorts of land ownerships were involved in habitat conservation plans of affected species. This realization created needs for interagency consultation and regional assessments. The RISC \[Society for Range Management's Range Inventory Standardization Committee (1978)\] group quickly found that the main problems were not just data collection techniques, but due to differences in terminology and interpretations of data. Resolutions of these differences required discussion of fundamental scientific and ecological principles upon which these terms and interpretations rested. Different schools of thought, agency cultures, and turf existed. Willingness to compromise was viewed as betrayal to some of the participants’ parent organizations. SRM established the Unity in Concepts and Terminology Task Group (UCT) in 1989 with the charge to ‘‘continue professional dialogue on terminology, ecological concepts, and interpretations of ecological data relating to range classification, inventory and monitoring.’’ The next SRM committee established to deal with the topic was the Rangeland Assessment and Monitoring (RAM) Taskforce, in 1997. Linda Joyce, of USFS, was the first chairperson. The top priority of RAM was to try to move the major three land management and advisory agencies (USFS, BLM, and NRCS) toward adoption of a common means of rangeland monitoring. The Clinton administration was not supportive of this effort. One of the NRC \[Natural Resources Council\] directed workshops held in 1980 was devoted to inventory and monitoring. Eleven recommendations were made by the Committee on Developing Strategies for Rangeland Management (CDSRM, 1981) concerning inventory and monitoring. A book (CDSRM, 1984) was published containing all of the delivered talks and summarized discussion. Most of the suggestions have not been followed up on, but remain relevant. The CRC \[Committee on Rangeland Classification\] (1994) group emphasized that three criteria (soil stability and watershed function, distribution of nutrients and energy, and recovery mechanisms) be focused on in future monitoring. Thus, ecological functionality was stressed over the structural features everyone had used before. This was a distinctive divergence from the past. A pitch was also made for more use of remote sensing and GIS....The part of this NAS report that was most picked up on was the check list for rapid assessment (Pyke et al., 2002). Thus, we again see surveys turned into assessments through space-for-time substitutions without true monitoring. In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked the NAS to produce a report on indicators that could be used in constructing a report card on the environmental health of the nation. This resulted in National Research Council (NRC, 2000) report that outlined the biophysical possibilities. In 2001, an unprecedented effort by federal, NGOs, industry representatives, and academics began as a round of meetings across the country. SSR’s \[Sustainable Rangelands Roundtable\] goal was to distinguish a set of criteria and indicators for determining sustainability of rangelands (Rowe et al., 2002). It is expected that this effort will produce a framework of variables to use for monitoring rangelands at multiple scales, from the nation to individual enterprises. The man who has probably convinced more rangeland managers to monitor than any other is Alan Savory. Because there are lengthy swings in climate that are primary drivers of ecological responses of semiarid rangelands, several (Archer & Smeins, 1991) have suggested that runs of data have to bracket both wet and drought year sequences in order to distinguish the variations in biotic features due to management from those due to climate. In other words, time series of data spanning 20 to 25 years duration are ordinarily required for true trends to be decipherable from time series. The above are the essential elements of the ARS initiative described by James et al. (2003). I judge the proposed ARS approach to be the most logical response to local needs. A reliable national perspective on rangeland condition could be obtained from expansion of either the FIA, NRI, EMAP, or LUCID approaches to rangelands under all ownerships. There is also the possibility of a new approach incorporating the best features of these four extant approaches and variables suggested by the Heinz Center and SRR. %% end annotations %% %% Import Date: 2024-08-15T07:18:50.512-06:00 %%