By Johnny Ramirez

Working in the in the Alaska Tundra above the Arctic Circle is a unique experience. It is hard to know whether or not the sun actually sets during the extremely short nights. The ground is an endless carpet of moss and lichen. The tallest shrubs reach no higher than halfway to your knee. This leaves Sarah McCord, Ecologist with the Jornada Experimental Range, feeling like a giant as she and her team take measurements to understand how healthy the land is. “We stretch out our measuring tapes and sometimes they are blowing in the wind. The caribou freak out and will start bugling and running around. That’s always fun.”

Why do we need to measure land health?

The BLM (Bureau of Land Management) is mandated to allow and balance multiple uses of public land, which means they have to make management decisions on which activities to allow, at what intensity, and in which locations. “In general, we want to know how healthy our land is,” says McCord. “How is the land responding to management systems that we have in place for a particular landscape? Do we have enough wildlife habitat? What are the effects of oil and gas development on BLM lands?” The answers to these questions depend on accurate data collected by technicians on the ground. However, for a long time there was little agreement across the BLM on how to measure ecosystem conditions in response to management.

As a result, data was being collected using different methodologies by different technicians, and in some cases it wasn’t being collected at all. It became difficult to know land health within a single management area and became impossible to know it across the nearly quarter billion acres of public land in the United States. The solution was AIM, the Assessment Inventory and Management program, which is the BLM strategy to consistently measure and understand the ecosystems they manage. With a standardized methodology to measuring land health, the BLM will now be able to make better informed decisions on land management.

How do you measure land health?

The specific methods for measuring indicators of land health were in large part developed at the Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, New Mexico. “The Jornada has had a longstanding role with the AIM program. We’ve been working with the BLM since the inception to figure out what are the things that we want to measure, and we call those things indicators. So, what are those indicators of land health? What’s the most efficient and unbiased way to measure those indictors? A lot of the research the Jornada has been doing for a long time has culminated in this program.”

“I equate it to human health” says McCord. “You want to use your body and use your life now, while also protecting it for future activities and things you might want to do in 10-15 years.” When a person goes in for a check up, the doctor will take certain key indicators of health. Blood pressure, heart rate, body temperate; abnormal values in these measures indicate that the body is not in a healthy state.

Likewise, the land has certain indicators that can tell ecologists how healthy the land is. They focus on three main areas:

• Hydrologic Function (how water moves across the landscape and its ability to capture water as it falls and release it so it doesn’t cause flooding)
• Soil and Site Stability (the ability of the soil to support vegetation growth, its health and its ability to prevent erosion)
• Biotic Integrity (how healthy the vegetation community is and how well it supports wildlife)

“The first step”, says McCord, “Is to ask a good question. I’m working with a solar energy zone in Southern California, and we want to know what the impacts on the broader landscape are. The second step is to plan where you’re going to go in order to answer the question. Then the third step is actually to go out there and collect the data.” This uses a combination of satellite imagery and technicians on the ground to look at the soil profile and collect vegetation data. The final step is “to work with the people who proposed the question to then answer that question. Do the analysis of the data in order to answer their question, and help them know what the effectiveness of management action would be.”

With AIM, the BLM now has a set of core indicators of land health. “We’re going into the sixth year of data collection for AIM and we are looking at AIM implementation in almost all of the western states that BLM works in. We are definitely out of the pilot and experimental phase and into a very operational phase of things.”

The future looks bright for AIM. McCord has noticed those involved taking ownership of data collection and they have begun using the data to inform management decisions. “Hopefully we create a culture of standardized and consistent data collection to be able to make informed management decisions, to adjust when needed, and to be able to respond to issues as they arise, to not have to be reactionary, but to be able to be more proactive.”

McCord returned to Alaska the week after our interview but not for field work. It is January and the days are cold and dark. She was returning for a training seminar in Anchorage where a new team of BLM staff and managers will learn how to gather and use this information to make important decisions so that the land will remain healthy and so all who rely on it, both human and nature, can use it.

For more information visit https://jornada.nmsu.edu/aim

Special thanks to Sarah McCord (smccord@nmsu.edu)