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Ecological site descriptions are increasingly being used by land managers to develop monitoring plans, design post-fire rehabilitation plans, and restore wildlife habitat. We have developed a system of grouping ecological sites that enhances the utility of ecological sites at larger spatial scales and improves the ability to make ecological inferences between and among individual ecological sites. A Disturbance Response Group (DRG) is a collection of ecological sites within a Major Land Resource Area that respond similarly to disturbance. Group membership is initially determined by dominant vegetation, soils and mean annual precipitation range and then is refined further by the disturbance ecology of the Reference plant community in combination with environmental variables. Because the DRG process incorporates ecological dynamics from the start, sites within a DRG have similar state-and-transition models. This expedites the field verification and model-building process for multiple ecological sites. DRGS can be joined to existing soil maps in a GIS using the NRCS Gridded Soil Survey Geographic (gSSURGO) database; in Nevada the resulting DRG maps have been utilized for stratification of monitoring points and for fire rehabilitation. An intended byproduct of the DRG process is the enhancement of users� ability to understand the underlying processes behind the ecological site concepts through consolidation of models and ecological site mapping.