Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), has been implementing the Bureau of Land Management�s terrestrial Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) strategy for the past four years.� The AIM strategy provides scientifically sound and technically defensible monitoring of multiple resource conditions to support management decision making.� The AIM strategy uses the generalized random tessellation stratified (GRTS) sample design to generate random sample locations within the project area that are weighted by ecological stratum.� The benefit of GRTS in long-term environmental surveys is spatially balanced sampling units that are weighted based the importance of the size of the stratum or the variance of the population parameter within the strata.� For example, giving more weight to strata commonly used for grazing allows for more robust statistical inference in those areas (i.e., better population and variance estimates within each stratum where grazing occurs).� The AIM strategy uses a core set of methods to assess plant community composition and vegetation heights to estimate forage availability, and species richness and diversity; and canopy-gap measurements and soil stability ratings to assess site stability and resilience.� In addition to inventorying the current ecological condition of the selected strata, these methods will also help to assess trends during the monitoring phase of the AIM strategy.� AIM points have been inventoried using three different approaches to stratum selection over the past four years:� (1) points stratified by ecological site descriptions (ESDs) within grazing allotments (2013); (2) points stratified by ESDs Monument-wide (2014-2015); and (3) points stratified using LANDFIRE Bio-physical Setting (BPS) Monument-wide (2016).� To date, there have been 131 AIM points collected Monument-wide, with 476 points scheduled to be collected between 2017 and 2026 using the LANDFIRE BPS stratification to complete the initial AIM inventory proposed for the GSENM.� Ecological site descriptions are common between all stratification methods and post-sampling stratification based on ESDs will be used to field verify ESDs based on strata.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.