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...

First posted May 31, 2022 For additional information, contact: Director, Earth Resources Observation and Science Center U.S. Geological Survey Sioux Falls, SD 57198Contact Pubs Warehouse The Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment Projection (RCMAP) project has partnered with the Bureau of Land Management to provide annual maps rangeland vegetation condition across Western United States from ...

Resource stratification for ground-based and remotely-sensed methods of rangeland assessment is essential for locating appropriate sampling sites. This is particularly the case when site comparisons are required, as in the case of grazing gradient analysis, wherein the objective is to limit the number of environmental variables. This study compared stratified units derived from supervised, unsu...

Rangelands of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau (QTP), although sparsely populated and contributing little to China’s overall economy, play an important environmental role throughout Asia. They contain high biodiversity values and can also potentially provide China with a source of cultural and geographic variety in the future. Chinese government reports paint a gloomy picture, considering vast porti...

First posted January 26, 2023 For additional information, contact: Director, Earth Resources Observation and Science CenterU.S. Geological Survey47914 252nd StreetSioux Falls, SD 57198Contact Pubs Warehouse The Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment Projection (RCMAP) project quantifies the percentage cover of rangeland components across western United States using Landsat imagery from 1985 ...

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for natural resource applications has increased considerably in recent years due to their greater availability, the miniaturization of sensors, and the ability to deploy a UAV relatively quickly and repeatedly at low altitudes. We examine in this paper the potential of using a small UAV for rangeland inventory, assessment and monitoring. Imagery with a...

Remote sensing is often used to assess rangeland condition and biophysical parameters across large areas. In particular, the relationship between the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and above-ground biomass can be used to assess rangeland primary productivity (seasonal carbon gain or above-ground biomass “yield”). We evaluated the NDVI–yield relationship for a southern Alberta pra...

The Need for New Monitoring Tools The earliest inventories of western rangelands were “ocular” estimates.1 Such estimates are subjective; they are opinions, judgments, or guesses based on experience and feelings—“the art” of rangeland management (Fig. 1). Now, our monitoring needs are different and the importance of objective data consistent with formal scientifi c inquiry is more essential; th...