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Ecological Sites (ES) have been official policy of USDA NRCS as a basis for resource inventory and assessment and conservation planning since 1997. They have also been implemented to varying degrees by USDI-BLM and USDA-FS since the early 2000s. While there has been substantial progress in both concept and application, the effort lacked consistency. That inconsistency diminishes credibility and weakens the ability of a wide variety of users to learn from the collective information, test important hypotheses and confidently create new applications. In early 2015, NRCS adopted a Provisional Ecological Site (PES) Initiative intended to complete an initial inventory of ES in the contiguous U.S. by 2020. The initiative calls for the organization of soils and vegetation data at the Major Land Resource Area (MLRA) scale. Each MLRA is considered completed only when all described soils are organized into an ES key and initial State and Transition Models (STM) are completed and reviewed. Generalized STMs and associated information provide sufficient evidence for site specific inventory and establishing management objectives, identifying important ecological processes and selecting appropriate conservation practices. As a complementary endeavor, MLRAs are being updated to quantify climate, geology, soil and land use attributes and reconcile with commonly used land classification systems.