Rangeland Ecology & Management

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APPLICATION OF BLM'S ASSESSMENT, INVENTORY AND MONITORING STRATEGY AT GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT, UTAH
Author
Xu, Lan
Johnson, Patricia S.
Hendrickson, John R.
Sedivec, Kevin K.
Brennan, Jameson R.
Publisher
Society for Range Management
Publication Year
2015
Body

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), a unit of BLM's National Conservation Lands, has been implementing the Bureau's Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring (AIM) strategy over the past two years. The purpose of the strategy is to provide scientifically sound and technically defensible multi-scale monitoring of multiple resource conditions to support management and decision-making. This is done partly through improved probabilistic sampling design and standardized inventory, assessment and monitoring methods. Initially, the strategy has been applied to assess and monitoring land health for both land use planning (large scale) and grazing administration (smaller, allotment scale). Applications include determining plant community composition to allow spatially-explicit estimates of forage availability using ecological site descriptions (ESDs), and evaluating options for integrating the existing key area-based monitoring framework with AIM's probabilistic sampling design while preserving the utility of historic data to establish trends in vegetation condition and plant community structure. Results compare forage production estimates from ESDs based on determination of state and community phase from AIM data with those determined from rangeland health monitoring. Results from resampling and simulation modeling of existing non-probabilistic data provide estimates of the temporal and spatial representativeness of those data and allow comparison with those from AIM sampling. Evaluations of allotment condition for grazing management based on existing, key area-based data can be supplemented with AIM data. Future improvements include incorporating remote sensing into sampling design to allow variation in sampling density based on heterogeneity of vegetation condition and plant community composition, and adding indicators of aquatic resource condition. AIM applications on GSENM will eventually extend to support management of other resources such as cultural (archaeological), wildlife and recreational.

Language
English
Resource Type
Text
Document Type
Conference Proceedings
Conference Name
SRM Sacramento, CA