Location: Range Management Research
Project Number: 3050-21600-001-125-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jan 1, 2026
End Date: Dec 31, 2028
Objective:
This project will produce an integrated toolset for assessing rangeland Resilience and Threats (rRAT) that can be used to support land use planning, strategies to increase agricultural production, prioritizing and assessing restoration, reclamation and rehabilitation outcomes, conducting new lines of research into the efficacy of conservation practices on rangelands. The project is integrative in that it will bring together datasets and tools developed across CEAP-GL partners and will build on data accessibility and interpretation tools developed as part of the Landscape Data Commons. The rRAT will enable enhanced interpretation of threats to production, where conservation practices, restoration, etc. are needed, how effective practices are/whether management objectives are being met and will help US producers to build the capacity to implement more informed adaptive management.
Approach:
1. Establish concepts and theory underpinning assessment of rangeland resilience and threats that influence the ecological vulnerability of rangelands and impact production using standardized monitoring datasets and wind and water erosion
models;
2. Identify key indicators of rangeland resilience and threats that influence ecological vulnerability and production;
3. Develop spatial estimates of ecological state concepts and their change, indicating rangeland resilience, using standard monitoring data and remote sensing, including production estimates;
4. Develop spatial estimates of potential wind erosion using standard monitoring data, remote sensing, and the AERO model;
5. Develop underpinning science and spatial estimates of the impacts of soil erosion on soil health;
6. Develop spatial (weighted) estimates of indicators of and threats to biotic integrity (including biodiversity, native species, risk of invasion, pollinator habitat);
7. Establish a workflow for integrating the indicator datasets to assess the resilience, threats, and their potential impacts on the ecological vulnerability of rangelands;
8. Develop data layers for conservation planning and a web tool that enables visualization and overlay to assess possible interactions between indicators.