Lack of monitoring and reporting of rangeland restoration outcomes often hampers efforts to improve, replicate, and upscale effective restoration practices to other affected areas. The Global Land-Potential Knowledge System (LandPKS) aims to support these efforts by providing tools for land managers to inventory their resources, match treatment and control plots for restoration projects based on biophysical similarity and potential productivity, and monitor and evaluate project outcomes. We highlight current and potential applications of the LandPKS mobile application suite, including LandInfo and LandCover. LandInfo is a site characterization tool that is currently used in over 10 countries for collecting basic soil and topographic information. When combined with local climate information provided through the system, LandInfo can be used to determine site potential and identify ecological sites. LandCover is a tool for collecting soil and vegetation cover data that is compatible with large-scale rangeland monitoring efforts in the United States (e.g., NRCS National Resources Inventory; BLM Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring program) and facilitates monitoring of changes in plant community composition and assessment of wind and water erosion risk. Both these apps provide summary results to the user immediately assessment at plot level is completed, providing real-time information for decision making. The LandPKS system allows users to store data automatically on the cloud, negating the need for secondary data entry. In addition, LandPKS allows dynamic visualization of, and on-demand access to user data via a web portal. The open source nature of the system means that data collected is also accessible to other land managers and the larger research community. LandPKS provides tools for monitoring and evaluating restoration project outcomes and seeks to provide a framework for collecting, storing, and sharing local knowledge and scientific data necessary for informing management and policy.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.