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12.5.2.4 Monitor, Evaluate, and Adjust
Monitoring is essential to determine the effectiveness of restoration strategies and
projects and is the cornerstone of the adaptive management process. The BLM has
recently implemented an Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring ( AIM ) strategy to
more effi ciently and effectively meet local, regional, and national information
needs. A set of core indicators, standardized fi eld methods, remote sensing, and a
statistically valid study design are used to provide consistent information at multi-
ple scales (MacKinnon et al. 2001 ). The availability of monitoring data at multiple
scales improves opportunities to apply adaptive management principles.
Monitoring restoration treatments at the project scale contributes to the application
of adaptive management principles by providing the data necessary to evaluate the
effectiveness of ongoing projects and make adjusts to improve future treatments. To
assist in evaluating treatment success, the US Geological Survey created the Land
Treatment Digital Library (LTDL), an online resource to catalog historic BLM land
treatment information in the Western USA ( http://www.ltdl.wr.usgs.gov/ ). The LTDL can
be used to conduct queries, including about treatment effectiveness, at varying tempo-
ral and spatial scales for over 23,000 land treatments. This database provides manag-
ers with a large dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of restoration treatments and
adjust future restoration strategies for specifi c ecological sites. For example, the LTDL
was recently used to evaluate regional effectiveness of Emergency Stabilization and
Rehabilitation project sites that were seeded after wildfi re to reduce soil erosion,
improve wildlife habitat, and prevent further B. tectorum invasion (Pyke et al. 2013 ;
Knutson et al. 2014 ). Such analyses illustrate how data from assessment and monitor-
ing steps can be used to directly guide adaptive management decisions.
12.6 Management Implications
Much research and discussion has been devoted to chronicling Bromus invasion, their
effects on ecosystem processes, and factors that favor their dominance on arid and semi-
arid ecosystems in the Western USA (Chambers et al. 2007 ; Huttanus et al. 2011).
However, application of these frameworks using adaptive management concepts will
require a more concerted union between research discoveries, restoration practitioners,
and land management agencies. We suggest that proactive, adaptive, and systematic appli-
cation of restoration/management is needed in order to address the complexity of annual
grass invasion on Western USA semiarid ecosystems. The adoption of adaptive manage-
ment will require long-term consideration of site dynamics and iterative process-based
management interventions to address the characteristics responsible for Bromus persis-
tence. In addition, adaptive management that prioritizes landscape-scale restoration will
require greater integration of site-specifi c research results and assessment tools. Finally,
frameworks that consider the following topics may enhance adaptive management:
- Weather confounds adaptive management planning by introducing a large source
of environmental variability that is diffi cult to capture in a scientifi c management
T.A. Monaco et al.