Federal land management agencies provide stewardship over much of the rangelands in the arid and semi-arid western United States, but they often lack data of the proper spatiotemporal resolution and extent needed to assess range conditions and monitor trends. Recent advances in the blending of complementary, remotely sensed data could provide public lands managers with the needed information. W...

Small−holder farming in semi−arid areas is being forced to change to compensate for the needs of more people living under conditions of increasingly variable rainfall. As more land is used for agriculture, rangeland areas are reduced, so limiting the availability of animal fodder. The length of fallow periods where soil fertility may be restored is also reduced. This has forced herders and farm...

Land degradation in drylands is the process in which undesirable conditions emerge due to human and natural causes. Despite the particularly deleterious effects of degradation, and it’s potentially irreversible nature, regional assessments have provided conflicting extents, rates, and severities of degradation, both globally and regionally. Current monitoring of degradation relies upon the dete...

Image time series of high temporal and spatial resolution capture land surface dynamics of heterogeneous landscapes. We applied the ESTARFM (Enhanced Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model) algorithm to multi-spectral images covering two semi-arid heterogeneous rangeland study sites located in South Africa. MODIS 250 m resolution and RapidEye 5 m resolution images were fused to ...

We examined changes in rangeland health in the semi-arid woodlands of eastern Australia at fixed sites between 1989 and 1999. Over the 11-year period there were significant declines in the quality of the vegetation, and changes in plant species were driven largely by seasonality, and to a lesser extent, amount of rainfall. Three indices of rangelands health (composition, function and stability)...

Detecting land cover change over semi-arid rangeland is important for monitoring vegetation responses to drought, population expansion, and changing agricultural practices. Such change can be detected using vegetation indices, but these do not represent non-green vegetation and are dominated by seasonal changes. An alternative is to observe spatial changes in thermal emissivities, a measure tha...

This article examines the history of rangeland management on the El Rito District of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. The area became part of the U.S. Forest Service system in the late nineteenth century, when Mexican land grants in the area were not confirmed by U.S. courts. In the 1940s, the Forest Service implemented a series of grazing restrictions in the district. The art...