Monitoring Rangeland Health: A Guide for Pastoralist Communities and Other Land Managers in Eastern Africa

The African monitoring manual contains simplified methods requiring less specialized training and tools. Although written for use in rural Africa, it can have broader applications.

Sage Grouse Habitat Assessment Framework

The goal of the Habitat Assessment Framework is to provide policy makers, resource managers, and specialists with a framework for the conservation of sagebrush ecosystems across the landscape. This involves landscape-scale mapping and monitoring and provides standardized methods to help gather data locally that can apply to greater-scale monitoring and management efforts.

Archive

Monitoring Manual, 1st Edition (2005, 2009)

The Monitoring Manual for Grassland, Shrubland and Savanna Ecosystems is a two volume technical reference intended to provide a standard set of methods for monitoring project design and data gathering. It is the result of a partnership which started in 1994 between USDA-Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Jornada Experimental Range (JER) in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development, the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It is currently in its second edition and has been revised to reflect input from multiple agencies and experts as well as direct field testing of the methods.

Volume I of the Monitoring Manual contains the basic reference material required to implement a prescribed monitoring program collecting vegetative and soil data pertaining to soil and site stability, hydrologic function, and biotic integrity. Volume II contains in-depth information on monitoring program design, supplementary data gathering methods, adapting monitoring to meet special case needs, and data analysis and interpretation and can be downloaded here.

Older versions of Interpreting Indicators of Rangeland Health

If you need to reference an older version of the manual for Interpreting Indicators of Rangeland Health, version 3 (published in 2000) is available for download from the BLM library here.