Making better use of rangers' time in the field and easier ground-truthing of remotely sensed imagery are essential to more accurate assessments of rangeland conditions for the USDA Natural Resources Research Center. Here's how the agency is trying to revitalize its reporting capabilities-reports on rangeland improvements made widely available on CD-ROM or the Internet that consist of maps with digital still images, video, and audio organized by their GPS collection coordinates.

Three-ring binders seemed to symbolize many of the difficulties faced by USFS rangeland managers, noted Van Elsbernd, rangeland specialist at the U.S. Forest Service's Rangeland Management Service Center, and Curt Johnson, rangeland specialist at the U.S. Forest Service's Regional Office in Ogden, Utah. Over the years, the center in Fort Collins, Colorado and the Regional Office in Ogden had developed a system for monitoring rangeland environments. It relied on Forest Service rangers in the field to note their observations during surveys and later, once back in the office, correlate their observations with satellite imagery, field notes, and GPS coordinates. Then they would have to type the full report and affix photographs and other hardcopy media onto pages stored in a binder.

By 2000, these reports filled several thousand binders throughout Forest Service (FS) offices across the nation. Rangers criticized the manually intensive process and the cost and difficulty of making the binders available to other groups within the USFS for widespread information exchange and collaboration.

The agency of 123 forest supervisory offices and more than 600 district ranger offices found the process essentially discouraged more graphic, descriptive reporting about whether a rangeland was improving, maintaining, or worsening, particularly over time when change is gradual. Off-the-shelf software and technologies appeared to offer a solution.

The trouble was, Elsbernd noted, "When we looked into what equipment a ranger would have to carry in the field, we saw potential solutions that were overly complicated. Rangers would have to stop, unpack, and connect cables before performing numerous setup tasks and still the report would fit into a binder."

Not to leave the situation only partially fixed, Johnson and Elsbernd opened discussions with rangers about detailed work requirements and preferences. They described necessities for operational simplicity, user-friendliness, support of more detailed reporting, and importantly, facilitating information sharing across the USFS organization.

Moreover, advances in GPS, automated document solutions, and various wireless communication/networking standards made familiar by the trade press, prompted much higher expectations of the solution. Elsbernd's requirements document grew to include greater detail and clarity of the images used in the reports, features for optimizing rangers' time in the field, and enhancing the quality and accuracy of rangeland data for making more informed decisions.

Johnson and Elsbernd continued, prioritizing management requirements and matching them to various commercial solutions. Johnson found it when he saw a presentation at a Noxious Weed meeting in Utah. He immediately called Elsbernd and told him to visit a company based in Fort Collins, Colorado and look at their multimedia mapping software and its applications to rangelands. The software, MediaMapper, proved during evaluation and testing that it supported the agency's numerous requirements on many levels.

Timing was becoming crucial as all these issues and user expectations reached a state of critical mass in 2002. Yet, the decision to advance the agency's reporting processes beyond pilot testing and adopt MediaMapper finally hinged on simple realities. Rangers in the field easily used the system to collect and map rich audio-visual data. From their laptops, rangers would be able to store and manage all multimedia content. It combined their GPS track log, satellite imagery, and even text documents in a "mini-GIS" desktop application.

The combining of ground-based imagery is exceptionally valuable for land managers who must identify, inventory, and assess environmental changes in a time series, i.e., images collected from the same location over a period of time: weeks, months, years. Additionally, audio narration serves as a valuable compliment to what has been documented visually.

Not only does publishing reports on CDs significantly compress the physical size of documents, which is arguably a great improvement in the Forest Service process, the higher resolution of images equips users to make better assessments and comparison of rangeland conditions.

Using CDs also significantly cuts the costs of publication and information sharing among all levels from each district to regions and national offices compared to the hardcopy alternative. Since the deployment of MediaMapper, in fact, there is an increasing reliance on using the application as the Forest Service's "engine" for a standardized, interoperable, and GIS-friendly application. The engine enables and streamlines information access, distribution, and analysis no matter where an FS official is located.

"At the bottom line," added Elsbernd, "the solution supports HTML file output, which means to us that a report stored on a CD is easily converted to HTML files and subsequently shared across the Web as needed. The time and cost savings we anticipated were highly motivating for us in today's economy. "

"The really smart thing the Forest Service did was envision the place they wanted to arrive at in the future as an organization," said Carol Snyder, COO and Natural Resources Account Executive at Red Hen Systems, Inc. "When monitoring change over time, field data collected five years ago is just as valuable as today's information." Snyder concluded, "The solution is keeping all this data alive in a map database for the next generation of rangeland managers."

One National Forest in Utah, the Manti-La Sal NF, uses MediaMapper to visually record and display its rangeland improvements, such as water tanks and fences, record transect measurements across rangelands to determine rangeland health, and address any rangelands at risk-using ground based video/still imagery. No longer are binders and filing cabinets needed.

Field crews use GPS receivers to log accurate location and time information, digital and video cameras for recording digital images for immediate display on returning to the office, and personal data recorders for capturing essential information on rangelands. All multimedia content-pictures, video, GPS coordinates, and audio-can be loaded onto a computer, and managed and published in digital maps using MediaMapper. The digital mapping environment becomes the repository for all field data without the complexity and sophistication of a full-blown GIS.

In the future, the accumulation of more descriptive multimedia field data will undoubtedly lead to a better biological understanding and related decision-making. Faced with limited budgets and staffing shortages, the natural resources community must not only make the best use of field visits, but also be able to justify funding requests. The best way to make their case is through audio-visual documentation and the means to communicate it, spatially.