Overview
Rangelands provide many environmental benefits: open space, wildlife habitat, water storage and forage. These values are affected by rangeland condition. Accurately measuring rangeland condition has not been economically feasible because of the ambient variation in rangelands from place to place and year to year. To have an accurate measurement of conditions sample size needs to be very large resulting in high labor and equipment cost. ORC has created and developed techniques that overcome the cost of sample size. By coupling traditional ground sampling with remote sensing and GIS techniques, range sample data can be leveraged across the landscape to give an inexpensive, accurate, timely and global estimate of range conditions.