In May 2005, the Sustainable Rangeland Roundtable (SRR) asked the federal agencies participating in the Roundtable to develop a proposal for incorporating the SRR indicators into their ongoing assessment activities.  In response to SRR’s request, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and the United States Forest Service (USFS) agreed to develop a proposal which would build on two existing large-scale sampling programs – the USFS’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program and the NRCS’s National Resources Inventory (NRI) program.  Both of these surveys are approximately 70 years old, collect quantitative information from sample points, and supplement ground data with remote sensed data.  These surveys vary in terms of sample design, data collected, protocols used, and geographic scope.  The agencies agreed to conduct a pilot focusing on a small suite of SRR indicators to explore how some of these survey differences may be reduced through minor adjustments to existing procedures and to develop a proposal for extending the existing surveys to non-forested federal lands.  A 13 county area in Central Oregon encompassing 30 million acres was selected for the pilot.  This area was selected because there is a mixture of Tribal, federal, state and private lands, there is a good working relationship among the agencies, and there is a wealth of other data available to help evaluate the pilot.