Drought is one of the most costly impacts on rangelands, both monetarily and environmentally. Effective detection and monitoring can help mitigate negative impacts of drought. The USGS VegDRI drought monitor, which uses remote sensing data combined with other weather and climate information to determine drought conditions weekly, is processed using ESRI ArcGIS and Python to translate the dataset to a more useful product for land managers. The process reduces the geographic extent to an area of interest, such as a ranch. The overall drought condition of the area of interest is then calculated using a weighted method. The drought score is standardized and matches the scoring of VegDRI, which facilitates communication between agencies, landowners, and managers, and can assist in drought mitigation and management decisions.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.