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Public Lands Monitoring:
Your Story the Way It Happened

Photo monitoring is a quick way to document change on the range
using your smartphone.

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“Photo monitoring is one of the most easy and simple methods to do. It’s rancher-friendly. It’s accepted by agencies as monitoring, and it’s a complement to other methods that may be done. Photos help fill in the gaps,” said Amanda Gearhart, rangeland extension specialist for the University of Idaho.

“If you don’t tell your story, somebody else will, and you may not like how they tell it,” said Amanda Gearhart, rangeland extension specialist for the University of Idaho, at the 2015 Idaho Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers convention in Burley, Idaho.

“Rangeland monitoring data is an opportunity for you to tell your own story and to back it up with data,” she told her audience.

Grazing cattle on public lands is an affordable way to ranch for most western producers. However, public lands are under constant scrutiny from the public, and changes in management — whether they be as small as moving the portable toilet from one side of the parking lot to the other or as big as issuing permits to a mining company — are highly controversial, lengthy processes.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) are government agencies mandated by law (the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 and Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976) to manage the land for multiple use. They are also responsible for documenting and conserving the land under their jurisdiction, while maintaining working relationships with those who use the lands’ resources.

One way to track impact on the land is through monitoring. Monitoring, explained Gearhart, is designed to detect resource change over time.

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This is an example of a good photo. It has distinct, permanent landscape features, a small photo board in the corner of the photo that includes clear, legible information such as: the plot name (Site 1), allotment (Indian Valley), date, compass bearing and GPS coordinates.

It is the agency’s job to monitor, but due to budget cuts, the tremendous amount of paperwork now required from Agency staff, and the almost constant threat of litigation, said Gearhart, monitoring has been one of the tasks agencies have had much difficulty in directing resources toward.

Until now, many ranchers haven’t done much monitoring, either. Gearhart said the No. 1 reason among ranchers for the lack of monitoring data has been the concern about their work’s credibility and acceptance of their data by the agencies.

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This is an example of a photo that needs improvement. The hills are not distinct from other hills. The photo board is in the center of the photograph, and it is very challenging to read. It also lacks information. It has the plot name (#4), the allotment (Indian Vally — spelled incorrectly) and the date. Legibility is lacking.

“It takes time and commitment. If you are spending time out monitoring, that’s a day you’re not putting hay up, but on the other hand, there’s a cost to not monitoring, as well,” she added.

Even though the job may have been neglected in the recent past, monitoring is not new to the science of rangeland management.

“By and large, almost every allotment has had some sort of monitoring at some time in its existence. The current range specialist may or may not know what has been done,” she explained. That information, however, should be kept in the allotment’s file. These files may be called “permittee files” or “monitoring files” and may be kept in different departments within an agency — such as riparian monitoring data being housed in the Fisheries department, not the Range department.

All monitoring data is available to any member of the public, she said. Anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get data from federal agencies. The challenge is knowing where to look and for what to ask.

Premonitoring homework consists of choosing a location that will showcase change and setting monitoring goals to decide, “What do I want to prove or document?” she stated.

Monitoring goals may include:

She suggested photo monitoring as one way for ranchers to tell their story of the range.
“Photo monitoring is,” she said, “one of the most easy and simple methods to do. It’s rancher-friendly. It’s accepted by agencies as monitoring, and it’s a complement to other methods that may be done. Photos help fill in the gaps.”

Most importantly, photo monitoring is not useful to anyone if it is not done.


Determining useful monitoring
Gearhart explained what makes a range photo “good” or useful for monitoring, offering the following tips.

Gearhart also highlighted several smartphone/tablet applications she finds useful for photo monitoring. Most are available through the App Store and Google Play. She specifically named Grazing Records, ID Weeds, SoilWeb, GeoCam and Grass Snap.
Gearhart said her favorite is Grass Snap thanks to its photo overlay feature, which helps the user realign the new photo using the watermarked previous photo.

The Global Rangelands list of apps can be found here.

For those interested in learning more about photo monitoring, Gearhart offers range-monitoring workshops through a partnership between the Idaho Rangeland Resource Commission and the University of Idaho Rangeland Center. Dates and locations of workshops can be found on the Idaho Rangeland Resource Commission website as they become available at www.idrange.org.

For more information on photo monitoring or other types of rangeland monitoring contact Gearhart at 208-736-3610 or amandag@uidaho.edu



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Editor’s Note: Paige Nelson is a freelance writer and cattlewoman from Rigby, Idaho.



 


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