Public land managers face increasing pressure to provide a wide variety of goods and services from public lands. For the BLM, our enabling legislation includes a multiple-use and sustained yield mandate which increases the complexity of these decisions. The regulatory framework for the BLM mission is the fundamentals of land health (CFR 4180) which is based on sustaining ecosystem processes. These fundamentals provide a unified tool for evaluating the success of BLM decisions. In coordination with other agencies, the BLM has developed a strategy, the Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) Strategy, that when implemented informs these land health fundamentals. A key component of this program is standard indicators that describe the status and trend of terrestrial and aquatic resources, landscape pattern, and natural and anthropogenic disturbance. The information derived from these indicators describes the current status of BLM resources and can also be used to assess the departure from the desired condition. A departure from the desired condition initiates the adaptive management process that concludes with a determination of the causal factor(s). Management prescriptions can be developed to address the causal factor. The AIM monitoring approach, which couples standard indicators and methods, a statistically valid sampling framework, remote sensing technologies, and a robust data management, analysis, and reporting component, is currently being implemented through several major BLM initiatives. These include the BLM Western Solar Plan, the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, and the Greater Sage-grouse planning effort. The monitoring information will inform land managers when these, future, and ongoing programs of work require an adaptive management approach to meet the desired outcomes. The AIM program enables the BLM, stakeholders, and other agencies to look across scales, programs, and jurisdictions to make more informed decisions in this era of increased demand for goods and services from our public lands.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.