Rangelands cover huge swaths of land across the West—over one third of the conterminous United States. They provide critical wildlife habitat, forage for livestock, water resources, and recreational opportunities. At the same time, rangelands are vulnerable to weather, fire, invasive species, and even human disruptions. The US Geological Survey helps land managers by providing satellite data to most efficiently monitor and assess rangeland changes.

The USGS, in collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management, has developed the Rangeland Condition Monitoring, Assessment and Projection Project, also known as RCMAP. RCMAP uses Landsat imagery, in addition to other satellite and ground data, with artificial intelligence models to produce time series maps. They illustrate percentages of the types of ground cover, also known as fractional cover maps, from 1985 to 2024.

Land managers and scientists use RCMAP’s annual fractional cover maps to monitor changes in the vegetation, evaluate pest management practices, target future improvements, and determine where critical wildlife habitat exists. Leah Waldner is a scientist with the Bureau of Land Management:

"When we're working on resource management plans or environmental impact statements or environmental assessments, we're trying to compile all the available resources and data to help inform the decision maker. Having this tool out there at our fingertips is very cost effective and time effective, because we're not able to sample every acre of BLM land at a site specific scale. So I think that's where these data sets really shine. We can go in, download the data set and literally within a couple of days have numbers compiled that say this is what the vegetation community is looking like based on this data set."

RCMAP data breaks down rangeland ground cover into ten categories, ranging from bare ground to grass and shrubs to tree canopy cover. USGS scientist Adrian Monroe uses RCMAP data in his research to study species of sage grouse:

"One of our big projects is looking at how Greater Sage-Grouse respond to their landscapes, and sagebrush cover is an important component of their habitat, and so it's really useful for us to be able to see how sagebrush varies across these landscapes over space as well as over time, and so then we can relate that to trends in sage-grouse populations."

RCMAP data is used in a myriad of applications, ranging from sage-grouse and antelope habitat evaluation to grazing assessment and wildfire risk planning. Time is the most powerful attribute of RCMAP data because it enables users to evaluate locations and dates lacking field data. When field data is available, RCMAP data can assist in scaling up findings through space and time.

RCMAP data can be accessed and downloaded by visiting the website MRLC.gov/rangeland-viewer. For power users of the data, RCMAP is available in Google Earth Engine, Climate Engine and on AWS. With ten data classifications and over 30 years of data, RCMAP provides endless possibilities for researchers and land managers. There is a story to be told in the data nearly everywhere.