BLM Utah Terrestrial and Aquatic Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) Landscape Monitoring Project

Background: In 2004, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) conducted a program evaluation of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) resource protection activities. The OMB found ⿿gaps in the monitoring of resource conditions to support management decisions⿝ and that the BLM had no reliable mechanism for reporting on the condition of public lands above the local scale. The BLM established an Interdisciplinary Core Team that evaluated assessment processes, resource inventories, and monitoring procedures and developed a comprehensive plan of action that would lay the foundation for a monitoring strategy. Two reports, (1) the Local Workgroup Report for the National Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring Strategy (BLM 2007) and (2) the Findings and Recommendations for Regional Monitoring for Wildlife and Water with an Emphasis on Energy Development (Falise et al. 2008), were also completed and provided vision toward developing an Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) Strategy. The AIM Strategy is intended to reach across programs, jurisdictions, stakeholders, and agencies to provide data and information valuable to decision makers. The strategy focuses on 10 management questions important to land managers at varying levels of the Bureau, from field office to national levels. Answering each of the management questions requires a multiscale, coordinated, and integrated approach for new data collection while recognizing the value of many current monitoring activities. This approach will provide: (1) an opportunity to collect vegetation and soils monitoring data that can be used many times for many purposes and (2) the quantitative data essential for informed, defensible land management decision making, (3) opportunities to work with organizations that provide experience for entry level field positions within natural resource management agencies. Objectives: The principal objective of this project is for BLM to partner with a recipient to gather standardized data sets for reporting land conditions above the local scale and to collect data about specific ecological sites to determine ecological capability of the landscape to respond to management actions. Increased availability of ecological site description data will add increased knowledge of ecosystems which will benefit public rangeland users. Public Benefit: The public will benefit from this project by receiving increased accountability and information dissemination related to resource conditions, trends, and effects of management actions on a local and national scale. Interested members of the public will have access to more informative baseline vegetation and soils information during public scoping and project review process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).The public will also benefit from BLM⿿s increased ability to promote better management and to protect and enhance resource conditions, resulting in long term stability for resources and public lands in general.