Get reliable rangeland science

There is a growing thirst for data and digital tools to support adaptive rangeland management. Over the last two decades, adoption of standardized field monitoring methods has enabled unprecedented data collection across rangelands globally. Monitoring capability has been boosted by an explosion of remote sensing products and models that can leverage field datasets and cloud computing to extend predictions across space and time and produce new indicators of rangeland health. Integrating these datasets with decision-support tools has the potential to support the development of new knowledge systems and place data and interpretive tools in the hands of managers in the field. Here, we review examples of recent developments that are transforming how pastoralists, extensionists, scientists, and agencies make decisions about rangeland use and management. These developments leverage new perspectives on data quality, data harmonization and aggregation tools, models that produce new integrative indicators, standard frameworks for describing land potential, and applications of benchmarks to make objective and actionable decisions supporting adaptive land management. These improvements can dramatically simplify rangeland monitoring and assessment, in both developed and developing world contexts, in addition to increasing the decision-making value of rangeland monitoring.