Documentation of rangeland health comprises two primary parts.� First, there is the need to establish the standard.� This has been established as the rangeland health reference sheet, and is a description of proper ecological functioning within a normal range of variation.� As mentioned earlier in the symposium, this standard is divided into 17 indicators that are then combined to qualitatively describe the attributes of the three attributes of soil/site stability, hydrologic function, and integrity of the biotic community.� Second, there is the need to document the inventory of existing rangeland health specific to a particular point on the earth and a particular point in time.� These point data are then compared against the standard, or reference sheet, to determine the degree of departure.� It is logical to assume that a national database of both parts is needed.� Currently the rangeland health reference sheet is stored in the Ecological Site Information System (ESIS).� ESIS is no longer actively supported by NRCS and has lacked programming support for a number of years.� Efforts are underway to establish a new database to house ecological information and this may be a possible home for the rangeland health reference sheet.� There is currently no accepted central repository for rangeland health inventories.� The National Soil Information System (NASIS) has been tentatively identified as a repository for these records, but has not been widely adopted.� The uncertain standing of these databases offers up a unique opportunity to describe the business requirements of rangeland health documentation, and either identify an existing database or build a new database to meet current and future needs.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.