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Our focus is on the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain Region including the Great Basin, Columbia Plateau, Colorado Plateau, and surrounding areas. The climate of this large, arid to semiarid region is defined by generally low and highly variable precipitation. Much of the yearly precipitation arrives as winter snow because most of the moisture comes as frontal storms in winter instead of convective storms in summer. Strong gradients in both temperature and precipitation exist with mountainous areas receiving as much as 127 cm (50 inches) of precipitation a year, and lower elevation cold deserts receiving only about 13 to 18 cm (5 to 7 inches). The distribution of both species and vegetation communities is determined by these gradients. At low to mid-elevations, cold desert vegetation dominates including salt desert shrub, sagebrush steppe and sagebrush semiarid desert, and pinyon and juniper woodlands. At the periphery of the cold deserts and on mountain ranges, diverse forest types occur, including pines, firs, and spruce. Riparian areas, aspen ecosystems, and inter-basin forests dominated by drought-tolerant pines comprise smaller land areas, but support much of the region's biodiversity. Much of the land area is managed by the federal government with the Bureau of Land Management responsible for managing lower elevation shrublands and woodlands and the Forest Service responsible for higher elevation and mountainous areas. Consequently, the region's rangelands are managed for multiple uses, including nonextractive uses such as terrestrial and aquatic habitat for wildlife and fisheries, production of a high quality water supply, and recreational opportunities, and extractive uses such as mineral, energy, timber, and livestock production. Private, state, other federal agencies, and tribal governments manage rangelands for similar uses.