Get reliable rangeland science

Throughout the history of the Soil Conservation Service and now the Natural Resources Conservation Service, conservation planners have used trend determinations, species composition, range condition, and similarity index, to assess, communicate, and prepare decision maker�s to ultimately select management practices or techniques for land they managed and management goals they had identified. While these assessment tools, protocols, and methods have been successful through time, they were in some ways incomplete in fully addressing all indicators visually observed on the landscape.� Producers were ultimately needing additional information to make sound and responsible decisions to encourage landscape and plant community change towards an identified management goal. To address this need, NRCS conservation planners in Kansas, began a process of exposing ranchers and land managers to Rangeland Health and its seventeen indicators and three attributes.� This process first began through two adult oriented range schools hosted by the Kansas Grazing Lands Coalition.� During the three day schools, presentations and field demonstrations highlighted the data collection, analysis, and assessment of site specific information used to evaluate �Rangeland Health�. This process highlighted an awareness between both planner and operator and the importance of being able to identify and communicate observations and data from the rangeland resource which both cared so passionately about. Today conservation planners and producers alike, go beyond the casual observation and conversation of species composition, trend, and similarity index, and dig deeper into how sites function in optimum condition and departures away from optimum.� This one on one process and communication starts with a more complete understanding of soils, ecological sites, plant communities, and how they are supposed to function, to a relationship between conservationist and land manager and their adaptations to increased knowledge of their rangeland resource.