Part 5: Setting Realistic Objectives and Goals

Making Data Useful for Assessment of Management Decisions

Rangeland attributes are monitored to help you determine if management practices are moving you toward or away from your established management objectives. These attributes must be reliable indicators of the state of production resources, mainly forage production.

Before going into the details of what will be monitored, let’s set up some criteria for generating field data. Following these guidelines will improve the quality of your data making it more useful to you.

• Data should be objective, not subjective. In other words, data should include numerical measurements (even if estimated) and not be described verbally as “adequate”, “good”, ” fair”, “poor”, and “proper”.
  
  
• Field data should reflect observable features only. Observable features are objects and attributes that can be directly measured, estimated, or described. Inferences about processes that cannot be directly observed, such as nutrient cycling or erosion, should be included as notations.
  
  
• Attributes should be available for repeated measurements over time by different observers.
  
  
• Data collection at each key area should be limited to one vegetation type or ecological site.
  
  
• Monitoring of several key areas is preferable to monitoring only one large plot or transect.

For each vegetation type or ecological site, key areas should be carefully selected. Starting points for plot selection can then be randomly located. This reduces the chances of bias as data is collected and evaluated.