MISSOULA – Rangeland covers more than 1 million square miles in the United States – about a third of the country. These iconic grazing lands help feed the nation; act as recreational hubs that provide important revenue to local communities; supply water, mineral and wood resources; and are critical wildlife habitat.

John Carlson, a Bureau of Land Management conservation biologist and a 1988 UM alum, is training his staff in Montana and the Dakotas to capitalize on the new Rangeland Analysis Program. (Photo Courtesy of John Carlson/BLM.)
John Carlson, a Bureau of Land Management conservation biologist and a 1988 UM alum, is training his staff in Montana and the Dakotas to capitalize on the new Rangeland Analysis Program. (Photo Courtesy of John Carlson/BLM.)
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Rangeland managers and landowners continuously battle conservation challenges from invasive weeds to wildfires to ensure both healthy land and livelihoods, but it can be tricky to track how vegetation changes over time across these large swaths of wide-open spaces.

Now, researchers at the University of Montana, in collaboration with the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Bureau of Land Management, have developed a new app to make that task a little simpler.

Blending old-school data collection with cutting-edge technology, the Rangeland Analysis Platform – known as RAP – is an interactive web app designed to assist in monitoring and managing America’s rangeland. RAP is powered by Google Earth Engine and merges machine learning, cloud-based computing, remote sensing and field data to provide the first-ever annual vegetation cover maps to help improve America’s rangeland. The app can be accessed HERE.

For this 2015 prescribed fire in Nebraska, the RAP shows a decade-long increase in tree cover followed by a successful decrease in trees after the burn. (UM Photo Courtesy of Brady Allred.)
For this 2015 prescribed fire in Nebraska, the RAP shows a decade-long increase in tree cover followed by a successful decrease in trees after the burn. (UM Photo Courtesy of Brady Allred.)
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The Rangeland Analysis Platform was built to help land managers evaluate outcomes. For this 2015 prescribed fire in Nebraska, the RAP shows a decade-long increase in tree cover followed by a successful decrease in trees after the burn. Courtesy of Brady Allred.

This free tool empowers landowners and managers to track vegetation changes over time from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast at any scale from whole regions to individual ranches by instantly producing an interactive map that estimates and shows groundcover, including annual and perennial grasses and forbs, shrubs, trees and bare ground – all with the click of a mouse.Pair it with site-specific local knowledge, and the app can help people easily access information to guide land management decisions – from visualizing the impacts of drought in the Southwest to designing conifer-encroachment treatments in the heart of sage grouse country.

The app was featured on the USDA blog  HERE.  A study detailing the app is published in Ecosphere and is available HERE.

RAP combines the best traits of traditional monitoring methods while using advances in technology to overcome limitations. The user-friendly app lets people explore rangelands at an unprecedented combination of space, time and scale to plan management actions that improve agricultural operations, enhance rangelands and boost wildlife habitat.

The technology, pioneered by scientists in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation, took two years to develop. Primary UM researchers include Matthew Jones, an ecologist and remote sensing scientist and the project’s lead research scientist; Brady Allred, associate professor of rangeland ecology and the app’s creator; and Dave Naugle, professor of wildlife biology.

RAP marries over 30,000 field plots from the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s National Resources Inventory and the Bureau of Land Management Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring datasets with the historical Landsat satellite record and data about meteorology, elevation and soils. The team used machine learning – the concept that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so – to produce the vegetation maps.

“In the case of the RAP, we invoke a machine learning algorithm to learn the relationships and patterns between data collected in the field and a massive suite of satellite and land surface data,” Jones said. “Using those relationships and patterns the algorithm can then make predictions of vegetation cover over areas where we don't have field data.”

John Carlson, a Bureau of Land Management conservation biologist and a 1988 UM alum, is training his staff in Montana and the Dakotas to capitalize on the new Rangeland Analysis Platform. Courtesy of John Carlson/BLM.

The tool also utilizes the computational power of Google Earth Engine to produce charts and maps across the western half of the country.“By working with Google, we harnessed decades of satellite imagery, trained it with on-the-ground field data and put it at the fingertips of practitioners,” Allred said in the USDA blog post.

“With the creation of RAP, rangeland monitoring is now only limited by the frequency with which satellites orbit the Earth,” Jones said.

Managers across the West are already putting the app to good use. John Carlson, a BLM conservation biologist based in Billings, is training his staff in Montana and the Dakotas to capitalize on this new technology. He earned a zoology degree from UM in 1988.

“This is where cowboy boots meet big data,” he said. “RAP empowers us to look backward in time and across public lands to assess management effectiveness.”

Managers and landowners can learn more about RAP and how to use it during a webinar at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 25. More information about the seminar can be found HERE.

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