The Great Basin Institute (GBI), in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has implemented the Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) strategy to conduct ecological assessments of rangelands across the West. In 2011, this partnership began in Nevada and has since grown to include partnerships with Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. GBI-coordinated field crews work closely with BLM field and district offices to respond to needs of each BLM jurisdiction while maintaining consistency across states in terms of field protocols, study design, site selection, and data management. This approach has allowed collection of standardized data to inform land management concerns at multiple scales, ranging from local to west-wide. To ensure data integrity, GBI has developed a rigorous quality assurance and quality control methodology, which includes standardized supplemental training and use of a custom database application requiring crews to work closely with a data specialist. Moreover, final reports that include methodology and summary statistics provide an additional product to aid the BLM in land management decisions. GBI�s standardized approach to AIM protocol�implementation produces consistent, comparable, and scalable rangeland data to characterize and monitor ecological trends. High quality data resulting from GBI/BLM AIM partnerships inform management decisions such as livestock grazing permit renewals and sage-grouse habitat conservation.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.