BLM-Oregon, Land Health Monitoring Vale District

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. Additional or supplemental data collection for fuels treatments (pre and post treatment), wilderness study area monitoring, and rangeland health indicators provide the information to determine the effectiveness of management actions, and may be shared across BLM offices and interested publics.