Thursday, August 9, 2007
Exhibit Halls 1 and 2, San Jose McEnery Convention Center
Ecosystem managers and restoration practitioners require tools for guiding the development of long-term restoration strategies. This need is particularly urgent given decreasing management budgets, increasing management costs, and vast spatial extents of many management units. One such tool was applied on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument – a 761,000-ha landscape managed by the Bureau of Land Management in southern Utah. Between 2000 and 2002, Monument staff assessed ecosystem conditions at over 500 sites distributed among 50 ecological land types to identify and prioritize needs for restoration, monitoring, and other resource-management actions. Assessments were conducted using the technique Interpreting Indicators of Rangeland Health, which involves the qualitative evaluation of 17 ecological indicators to gauge the status of three ecosystem attributes – soil / site stability, hydrologic function, and biotic integrity. Indicators were evaluated on the basis of conditions observed at reference areas, team members’ collective field experience, and reference information developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Quantitative data on plant community composition, ground cover, and soil aggregate stability were collected to inform the evaluation of qualitative indicators. This integrated collection and application of qualitative and quantitative data produced clear results indicating that shrubland ecosystems dominated by sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) currently are in greatest need of management attention. Though focused on a single management unit, this approach produced regionally significant data by documenting patterns of ecosystem condition in relation to soils, landscape setting, and elevation; by identifying reference areas, and by quantifying gradients of ecosystem condition.
