The 2008 Joint Meeting of the Society for Range Management and the America Forage and Grassland Council. |
Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 9:50 AM
The Selection of Ecological Indicators for Development of a Consistent National Rangeland Inventory
Dennis Thompson, Ecological Sciences Division, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, South Ag Building, Room 6152, 14th and Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, DC 20250-0016 and Leonard Jolley, Resource Inventory and Assessment Division, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, 5601 Sunnyside Ave. Rm 1-1282B, Beltsville, MD 20705.
Consistency of data to determine the status of the nation’s rangeland resource is lacking. The Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service agreed to identify data that would be useful to demonstrate that cooperatively a national inventory could be successfully conducted to provide reliable data for reporting the status of the nation’s rangelands. Each agency defined, presented and defended ecological indicators that, if available, would be useful to accomplish agency objectives and correlated them to the list of 64 indicators developed by the Sustainable Rangeland Roundtable (SRR). (The Sustainable Rangeland Roundtable promotes social, ecological, and economic sustainability of rangelands through the development and widespread use of the criteria and indicators for rangeland assessments.) The agencies collaboratively identified five ecological indicators from these to test in an Oregon Interagency Resource Pilot. Rangeland management specialists, ecologists and statisticians from each agency identified and recommended data collection methods and developed a sample design for the Oregon Pilot.