2011 Annual Report 1a.Objectives (from AD-416) Principal focus of the CEAP effort is to produce a national assessment of environmental benefits of conservation programs to support policy decision and program implementation. 1b.Approach (from AD-416) Utilize ARS historical watershed databases to validate the SWAT model and then utilize this model to determine the impact of conservation practices on water quality, soil quality, air quality, and wildlife habitat. 3.Progress Report This project was established in support of Objective 2 of the in-house project: Devise management guidelines, technologies, and practices for conserving and restoring Great Basin rangelands. The USDA team working on Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) has developed a new process based model for assessing soil erosion rates on rangeland hillslopes. The Rangeland Hydrology and Erosion Model (RHEM) was developed exclusively from data collected from rangeland erosion experiments. The model is designed to use data that is routinely collected by rangeland managers. RHEM will be used to calculate runoff and erosion at the hillslope scale and will replace the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation on grazing lands. The team has completed analysis of data from over 10,000 field sites collected by Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in support of the National Resources Inventory. This model is scheduled for release by NRCS as part of its streamlining conservation initiative in 2013. The team has developed 2 publications that summarize water induced soil erosion on rangelands for the Nation in support of the USDA Resource Conservation Assessment report that was submitted to Congress in January of 2011. The team conducted 2 special symposiums on the Conservation Effects Assessment Projects progress on estimating soil loss on rangelands at the 2011 Society for Range Management annual meeting in Billings, Montana and at the Soil and Water Conservation Society annual meeting in Washington, District of Columbia. The ARS Principal Investigator has a monthly teleconference with his ARS and NRCS partner’s to discuss the status of the project. The ARS and NRCS partners met four times in FY 2011 to review progress on the project and make adjustments as required to achieve milestones and obtain project goals.