Get reliable rangeland science

Every year, the US Forest Service creates new management data in the form of Annual Operating Instructions and monitoring data on allotments. Periodically, environmental analyses are conducted to enable updating of Allotment Management Plans. Over time, these data have developed into a long-term record of how our public rangelands are managed and the ecological changes that have taken place. Unfortunately, these data are also difficult to access because they are most often located in paper files stored in ranger district offices scattered around the United States. These data are referred to as �dark data� � data that are collected, but lost or underutilized because they are forgotten or relatively inaccessible to managers and researchers who do not have access to the original records in paper file systems. In order to put these data to use, a massive effort is required to digitize them, code them, and organize them into a database that can be queried by interested researchers. In this presentation, we will review an ongoing effort in Arizona and New Mexico to create such a database for approximately 400 allotments in nearly 30 ranger districts across both states. The data collection, processing, and coding process will be reviewed, along with the process of translating key variables into a database that can be used to answer questions about the use of adaptive management in the US Forest Service�s Southwest Region. This data collection effort is part of a larger interdisciplinary project to assess the impacts of adaptive management on range condition and socio-economics in the southwest.