A young Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep grazes contentedly at Whiskey Mountain in Wyoming. (courtesy National Bighorn Sheep Interpretive Center)
A young Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep grazes contentedly at Whiskey Mountain in Wyoming. (courtesy National Bighorn Sheep Interpretive Center)
Working with others to restore and maintain the health of the land is the foundation for everything the BLM does. Livestock grazing, timber harvesting, hunting, fishing, and other resource uses can be sustained over time only if the land is healthy.
Healthy lands are lands whose processes are in balance. And this balance is dynamic: humans can work with changing conditions to receive a predictable and reliable flow of both commodities and amenities. Healthy lands are resilient and, as a rule, respond predictably to disturbance, while providing for human needs and values. Key ecological systems that interact in dynamic balance include human, hydrologic-land, carbon-nutrient, food web, and evolutionary systems.
Generally speaking, land health changes slowly over time. Because the BLM is mandated to take a long-term approach to managing the public lands, it focuses on how well ecological processes function within and across ecosystems or watersheds.
Many of the lands managed by the BLM were degraded by the end of the nineteenth century because of unsustainable livestock grazing, timber harvesting, and mining practices. While important strides have been made in this century in developing and applying more sustainable management practices, resource conditions are still unsatisfactory in some areas.
The U.S. Forest Service, in its 1993 Renewable Resource Assessment update, found many of the Nation's rangelands in unsatisfactory condition; timber mortality up by 24.3%; a backlog of unreclaimed, abandoned, and inactive mines, including many on public lands; and continued loss of biological diversity.
The public lands are just one component of a larger, intertwined, and interdependent landscape that has a variety of owners and managers, both public and private. Working with others, the BLM is helping to develop and implement an overall strategy for maintaining and restoring the health of the land. This strategy has three interrelated components:
In implementing this strategy, BLM's efforts are being guided by several principles:
Most of the lands managed by the BLM in the American West are characterized by thin soils and low annual precipitation. They are subject to a wide variety of environmental stresses. In some areas, it will be impossible to restore the lands to their previous resiliency and diversity. In other areas, decades may be required to demonstrate any real progress.
While recognizing these difficulties, the BLM is committed to moving forward. The actions that the Bureau plans to take to restore and maintain the health of the public lands are discussed in terms of accomplishments under three interrelated strategic goals: (1) Establish and implement management standards and guidelines, (2) Identify resources at risk, and (3) Restore public lands to healthy condition.
View from Mt. Bennett, Idaho. (courtesty BLM's Idaho State Office)
Standards are expressions of physical and biological conditions or the degree of function required for healthy, sustainable lands. They are developed to meet local conditions and are included in the land use plan for the area. To ensure consistency across the public lands, the standards provide for ensuring that:
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The BLM is also establishing management guidelines. For instance, guidelines for grazing management describe the grazing methods and practices needed to ensure that standards are met or that significant progress is made toward meeting the standards.
Establishing and implementing standards and guidelines is a complex undertaking that will require the BLM to closely coordinate with others. Because of the diversity of ecosystems represented on the public lands, these standards and guidelines may vary from one area to the next. Once standards and guidelines are implemented, BLM's ability to make consistent, proper land-use decisions for the benefit of all will be greatly enhanced.
During 1997, standards for land health were approved for all of BLM's rangeland acreage. This was done in concert with the Healthy Rangelands Initiative supported by the Secretary of the Interior. Standards have also been incorporated into land use plans in the Pacific Northwest Forest Area.
Successful development and application of health standards depends upon general agreement and acceptance by all affected interests. To help accomplish this, the Secretary of the Interior has established Resource Advisory Councils. These Councils have been carefully structured to represent the wide array of diverse views and ideas in each region. There are 24 Resource Advisory Councils advising BLM's State Directors.
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Reliable information about prevailing public land health and how it has changed over time is essential to maintaining and restoring the health of the land. The BLM must determine which lands are healthy, which are not healthy, and which are at risk. At-risk lands often provide the best opportunities for improvement at a reasonable cost. The BLM will determine the priority of lands that are at risk and then alter management strategies and actions to reduce risk wherever feasible.
The BLM is committed to managing the public lands on a landscape basis--a "big picture" approach--that considers conditions and resources across a land area and takes into account adjacent lands connected by functions and/or processes. To understand and reduce risks, assessments must provide reliable information about the fundamentals of land health.
In the past, most BLM resource data has come from local inventories or monitoring. While site-specific data are essential for many day-to-day management decisions, they do not necessarily help the Bureau manage on a landscape basis. Consequently, one of the challenges facing the BLM is developing and applying a unified assessment system.
The BLM is not alone in recognizing the need for a reliable, cost-effective way to assess land health. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently coordinated the development of a framework that will help integrate existing monitoring and research. That framework is now being tested through a pilot in the mid-Atlantic States.
The Bureau will take the lessons derived from such efforts and, in collaboration with others, develop a monitoring and assessment system that can be applied on a routine basis over widespread areas. This assessment system will have to be understandable, cost-effective, reliable, and repeatable and will require widespread support to be of most benefit. It should also include the use of remotely sensed data (i.e., derived from satellite imagery) and other emerging technologies.
Fall cattle drive along the Gold Belt Tour Backcountry Byway. (courtesy BLM's Colorado State Office)
During FY 1997, the BLM worked together with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to determine how well the National Resources Inventory, conducted by that agency periodically on private lands for the past several decades, might be adapted for assessing and tracking the health of rangelands. The test effort was conducted on 7 million acres of BLM-managed rangelands in Colorado. The test results are not yet complete; analysis of these results and the lessons learned will take place during 1998.
The BLM is also participating in a number of other interagency and intergovernmental assessments of ecological condition, trend, and function. Examples include the Eastside and Upper Columbia River Basin assessments, primarily in Oregon and Idaho, and the Henry's Fork assessment in Idaho and Wyoming.
These assessments are crucial to improving BLM's understanding of natural and human sources of ecosystem stress. They also help identify areas that warrant restoration and maintenance activities. The accompanying table shows those areas where regional health assessments were completed in FY 1997.
The BLM will continue to use existing quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess individual grazing allotments, riparian areas, key watersheds, and priority upland areas. The results of these assessments will be used to help focus the restoration and maintenance activities discussed in the next section.
The BLM will use the results of assessments to identify lands not meeting health standards and resources at risk. The Bureau is committed to restoring public lands to a healthy condition wherever feasible.
The lands managed by the BLM are, to a large extent, ecologically sensitive to disturbance and require long periods of time for the natural recovery processes to occur on their own. This is why specific land treatments are sometimes necessary to bring about restoration.
The BLM is focusing its efforts on restoring areas that are functioning at risk and that are expected to yield the greatest benefits. These areas are usually high in value and show promise of responding to management intervention.
During the next few years, the BLM will give priority to restoration efforts in key watersheds, riparian and wetland areas, and special status plant and animal habitats. The Bureau intends to make greater use of managed fires and mechanical practices to reduce hazardous fuel build-up and restore healthy conditions to forests and rangelands. The BLM also envisions opportunities to arrest the spread of invasive, noxious vegetation (commonly referred to as weeds) through implementing cooperative action plans.
The accompanying table shows specific health condition improvements on BLM-managed public lands in FY 1997 for riparian areas, wildlife habitat, and wetlands, as well as weed treatment acreages.
Because funding available for restoration will often be a limiting factor, the BLM intends to emphasize development of cooperative strategies with involved State and local government entities, other public bodies, and interested stakeholders. One example of this is the Western Abandoned Mine Partnership proposed by the Western Governors Association and the Department of the Interior to improve streams degraded by abandoned mining operations. The BLM is committed to expanding partnerships such as this.
Each year, the BLM takes actions required to maintain healthy lands. This is accomplished through a variety of means, the most common being the prescription of use conditions, establishment of special designations, and monitoring.
Whenever the BLM authorizes a use on the public lands, it attaches conditions designed to sustain the long-term capacity of the land and to maintain healthy conditions. The conditions needed in each case are determined primarily through the environmental review process called for by the National Environmental Policy Act. Each year, the BLM conducts thousands of reviews to consider proposals covering millions of acres.
Another means used by the Bureau is the designation of areas requiring special management to protect them and preserve acceptable health. A variety of designations are available that can be adapted to the specific circumstances and character of each particular setting. Some designations can be extended at the discretion of the BLM (administrative designations), while others are applied by statute when Congress determines that the national interest warrants (statutory designations).
Examples of administrative designations include areas of critical environmental concern (10,371,582 acres), wilderness study areas (18,020,549 acres), national natural landmarks (599,042 acres), and research natural areas (326,449 acres). Examples of statutory designations include Wild and Scenic Rivers (2,022 miles), wilderness areas (5,251,366 acres), and national conservation areas (11,689,774 acres).
The BLM systematically monitors public lands and their resources to ensure that management practices are achieving their intended objectives. Monitoring usually involves observing or measuring selected parameters at prescribed intervals as needed.
A fish ladder on Lake Creek in Oregon restores migration routes for native fish. (photo by D. Huntington)
