 Healthy range environment is good for everybody. Rangelands are probably one of the most important ecosystem in the world and they're also one of the most abundant. Why are rangelands important? The monitoring is kind of our report card. In North Dakota, rangelands comprise about 25% of the land area and the majority are in private ownership and managed by ranchers. Only a few million acres are managed by state and federal land management agencies and non-governmental organizations such as Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy. I think that monitoring is important so that a landowner or rancher spends time looking at what's actually going on in their range. Whether they monitor just for themselves or to show somebody else, a lot of times people don't spend any time looking at it and I think they actually need to say, today is my day I'm going to go see what's going on with my grass. Through monitoring you go out and you have something, if you can't see the progress that you make, it's kind of discouraging. In working with private landowners, it's important for them to set up some type of monitoring system so that they can tell whether the management they're applying or the changes that they're going to apply in their management are accomplishing their goals. Working on the national grasslands, we've got a contract with the public of the United States that says that we're supposed to keep track of the conditions on the rangelands and so the way we do that is through monitoring. Rangelands are really the fundamental base to our livestock industry throughout the world. They're also very critical for wildlife habitat. The monitoring component of rangelands to me is if you're going to manage rangelands, monitoring is critical to understand where you are, where you've been and where you're going to go. Healthy rangelands provide a variety of benefits which include forage for livestock, habitat for wildlife, water storage and filtration, soil erosion protection, and recreational activities including horseback riding, mountain bike riding, hunting, fishing and bird watching. How rangelands are managed impacts how well they are able to provide these benefits such as the amount and quality of forage available for livestock or habitat for wildlife. One of the things that we see the changes and as we've seen over time is in the badlands it's kind of a rough country and it's a lot of what you know you're looking at just gumbo flats and things like that. But it's kind of amazing because we have a lot of cactus and a lot of wildflowers and you see the diversity there and then also in the different grasses that are out there. The better you manage the more you see. On the national grasslands we have multiple use goals. You know once you start trying to divide resources up between different uses or values it gets kind of interesting. You know whether it's a watershed goal where we're trying to produce clean water, provide habitat for wildlife, just cover so that things don't blow away in the wintertime and also to produce other values like livestock, forage and you know those sorts of commodities. What we're looking at might be some areas that don't get much grazing use some that get fairly heavy use and everything in between. I think the Forest Service is going to use monitoring to look at where we're at on a similarity index and try to meet our different goals for early, mid and late seer. From an NRCS standpoint we really encourage the folks that we work with, private land managers to set up some type of monitoring system so they can monitor their land and determine whether their management is having the desired effects based on their landscape goals and production goals. We try to help them with that and we generally start out very simple like photo points which anybody can go out and do. Basically we help them find the sites. We tend to let them pick the sites so it's something of interest to them. Very simple setup. The main thing is to get a label in the photo so they know where it's at, what date was taken and that type of thing. And then to come back every so often and take that photo again. Just visually be able to measure that change. It's not always about the production but it's about what kind of plants are actually growing this year. We like to see wildlife. We would like to see more wildlife. There is much of an indicator to us right now as our monitoring is. I think it's important that not only the general public but our politicians understand the value of these lands because they are very valuable to our country and they need to be important when they look at policy issues for managing these lands, for keeping them intact. What we see on the land is a product of both the management and the environment including climate and soils. Whether you're managing for livestock forage or wildlife habitat how do you know that your management strategies are meeting your goals or if you are changing your management how do you know if you are moving your communities in the direction you want them to move? What we're looking at is what's changed over time and we're always surprised by what we find. Sometimes when we change management we think we know what's going to happen out there and nature has a way of surprising us. When you're setting up your monitoring you always got to keep in mind that the results you find or come up with may not be as a result of the management that's being applied it might be something out of beyond that manager's control such as weather, hail, drought, those type of things. So whatever direction it appears to be going you've always got to have that professional interpretation. You manage for a desired outcome and then financial productivity. If it isn't financially productive it isn't very fun and we won't do it. State and transition models are representations of the dynamics of the changes that occur to a plant community on a particular ecological site. State and transition models serve as a framework that provides insight into how communities will likely change in response to different management techniques. What a state and transition diagram does is buy ecological site it tries to lay out in a more simplified manner the dynamics of that plant community as it relates to the soils that it's growing on and the climate that it's growing in. To do a similarity index you would want to clip your plant species in your plots and sort them by your different species, your western green needle, gram of grasses if you're on a loamy and it will kind of let you know where you're at on the similarity index and where you're at on the state and transition model based on the production of each of those plants and what's there at the current time and we would compare where we're currently at to those sites. Why do we measure change? We measure change to determine where the current plant communities are in terms of management goals and species diversity. Species diversity is a number of different grasses, forbs and shrubs growing on a site and what we measure to determine how a particular community is functioning. When we write a land use plan we talk about what values we're going to protect what resources we're going to produce on those lands and the monitoring is kind of our report card. Change on rangeland is very subtle and people can be out there their entire lives and it really not look any different to them so without some type of real defined way of measuring it by the time you recognize a change you're over one of those thresholds and you're in a problem and it's very difficult to get back. The value of rangelands is often underappreciated because people see the rangelands and don't really fully understand what's going on out there. There's ecosystem processes that go on. There are animals that use it. There's humans that use it. We get our energy from there. There's lots of ecosystem services that the rangelands provide that are necessarily well recognized. The misconception is people see trees in the forest. What they don't see with grasslands is most of our value in grasslands that come to in terms of the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen cycling is it's below the ground. Most of our production in grasslands is below the ground so they don't see it and that's critical for proper functioning of our ecosystems, our atmosphere, the whole cycle that occurs in nature because they don't see it. It's in the roots. How do we measure change? Change on rangelands is a slow process that typically takes years to observe. You need a baseline inventory as well as incremental revisits known as monitoring to determine if change is occurring. You need to decide whether the change observed is due to natural variation or actual change. Natural variation would be the differences in temperature and amount and timing of precipitation that influence growing conditions. Inventory is a one-time observation and measurements that are typically more detailed than monitoring. We want a lot of information so that we can make informed choices about the characteristics or functions we will choose to monitor. Monitoring is a set of ongoing observations and measurements that are repeatable over time and space and pull out the parts from the inventory that we have decided need monitoring. These parts will show us change the quickest and with the least amount of effort. For example, percent of ground cover that is classified as bare ground would be a typical measurement or changes in species composition. I do a one-jump test with a spade. How easy does it go in the soil with one jump? It gets exciting and you can get family involved too. I don't think if we weren't doing what we're doing that they would really care to come back and be involved and see the success and that there is opportunity in ranching. Monitoring is a measure of whether the changes we make out there are accomplishing our objectives. We spend a lot of time now discussing and trying to figure out how do we enhance native species and try and slow down the invasives that are showing up in there. If you're monitoring as you apply the management changes, if it's going in the wrong direction, you know you better do something different and move in a different direction. Lands that aren't used can have detrimental effects. Ranchers on the land are a valuable resource that we can't afford to lose. Lands that are managed may be worth more in the future. It's important for the general public to know the value of range lands. There's a hole in terms of what they contribute to our society, whether it's an economic return to the livestock industry or its aesthetic value or its wildlife value, there's so many values to range lands. Even the carbon sequestration component that we get from its value to trapping carbon. One of the most important reasons for us to monitor range lands is not for our own benefit, or even for the benefit of the people who are here right now, but the ones that are going to come along later. If we're not monitoring them, we don't know. And therefore our children and our grandchildren don't know and can't be the best stewards of the land. It's precious. We like range land. The bugs like range land. The birds like range land. The antelope like range land. Ranchers raise grass for a living. They don't raise cows. We harvest it with cows. That gives us a protein source. But our crop is grass, and we have to have the range to raise it.