Conditions on U.S. rangelands have long been a source of concern to natural resource experts and land stewards. Within the past two decades environmental and social concerns have resulted in statutes and regulations prompting for improved land, water, and ecological monitoring and management practices. These mandates imply a need for significant amounts of information for managing, planning, and inventorying rangelands. The National Academy of Science published the NRC 1994 Report, Rangeland Health, as an alternative to Range Condition methodology. This report concluded that current rangeland inventories do not provide the data needed to support national assessments of rangeland health. The NRC Committee stressed that standardization of monitoring systems must occur and recommended that rangeland health be assessed based on the status of multiple environmental indicators representing the four basic ecological processes. The report did not produce a method and expressed a need for improved evaluations regarding ecological health of the nation's rangelands. The science of assessing rangelands is changing as concepts evolve, yet existing systems appear to be disincentives for land managers to incorporate. Rangeland monitoring is a tool to optimize economic benefits, improve and sustain ecological functions, and comply with legal mandates. The CRIS3 will reduce confusion by clearly translating ecological concepts involving complex processes and components, into standardized terms that the public can comprehend, and resource specialists can use to determine rangeland health. OBJECTIVES: The overall objective of this project is to develop and demonstrate a complete and fully operational Computerized Rangeland Information System3 (CRIS3) that will meet land manager's needs for a standardized ecologically sound rangeland monitoring and information management system. The CRIS3 will provide a suite of rapidly interchangeable monitoring protocols, which measure and rank four fundamental ecological attributes, production, canopy and soil surface cover, gap interspaces, and biotic diversity based conceptually on the outcomes of the 1994 National Resource Council (NRC) report, Rangeland Health- New Methods to Classify, Inventory, and Monitor Rangelands. The application results will improve management skills, ecological function, agricultural revenues, communications, and provides abilities to comply with statutory and regulatory monitoring requirements. The data will automatically store and archive ecological data that will assist with determining the best follow-on management practices, over time. This capability will enable more than 900,000 land stewards to learn and apply the resulting monitoring system on more than 770 million acres of public and private rangelands. Additional software research will determine information to install program menus for optimizing user efficiency and accuracy. To improve time, costs, and management practices, a knowledge based decision system will be researched and melded with USDA ARS participation, developing a fundamental understanding of key rangeland management issues through pilot testing, based on data patterns and summary analysis. Successful research and development in Phase II will produce a first-of-its-kind computerized rangeland information system, available to the land resource and management industry. APPROACH: Phase II will continue research and development of the prototype pocket computer that was determined feasible in Phase I. Further research, software design, and program development, is necessary to optimize a Computerized Rangeland Information System3 (CRIS3). Additional Phase II projects will develop plant/vegetation range regions (biomes), Matrix variations, pull-down menu's, snapshot data summaries, and an educational component for the mobile CRIS3. Web-based data storage and analysis will be developed for user feedback, reporting, and secure archiving, and will include analytical and/or knowledge based system design to provide general management recommendations from data results. Several field prototypes will be programmed to experience user testing by range experts from various vocations and rocky-mountain areas, making use of the educational/help application. All test participants will receive one mobile prototype after completing the four-day training course. Pilot testing throughout the growing season of 2004 will determine how to optimize software applications and user-acceptance, concluding with a comprehensive social-survey designed by students at Montana State University. Participants conducting field-testing include the Idaho Department of State Lands, State of New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, Solar Dollar Consultants, and university students. The research for the Matrix variations will involve expert range scientists from the USDA ARS stations and university professors. Determining general management recommendations for the knowledge base system will be broad since so many variables influence management practices, such as soil conditions, precipitation, length of growing season, and other uncontrollable factors. Expert involvement will determine the most common solutions, and the hardware program will be tested through the above user-test groups. The Principal Investigator and Range Technician, to confirm project success to the USDA ARS research consultants and University Professors will present a final project demonstration
