Global Rangeland Health Monitoring Framework
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This rangeland monitoring framework provides a globally applicable, evidence-based approach for assessing rangeland health and tracking change through time. It is designed to serve a range of applications, including the emerging Rangeland Stewardship Council (RSC) Standard, where it can serve as a common framework for monitoring ecological outcomes, assessing changes in health and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions aimed at strengthening rangeland resilience.
Despite growing interest in sustainable rangeland management and restoration, there is currently no widely accepted framework for monitoring ecological outcomes across rangeland systems. Existing approaches vary considerably in the indicators used, methods applied, and scales of assessment, making it difficult to compare results, aggregate data, or demonstrate progress consistently across landscapes and regions. These challenges are particularly apparent in rangelands, where high spatial and temporal variability in ecological conditions, climatic fluctuations, and diverse management systems can complicate the interpretation of ecological change. While rangeland resilience also includes important social, cultural and economic dimensions, a key gap currently lies in the measurement of biophysical changes across rangeland landscapes.
This framework responds to that need by defining a harmonised set of indicators of rangeland health and associated methodological principles that enable comparability across regions while allowing flexibility for adaptation to local contexts.
A core design principle is recognising that rangelands are inherently heterogeneous systems shaped by climate variability, soil health, vegetation dynamics, land use history, diverse land tenure and governance arrangements, and mobility patterns of livestock and wildlife. Effective monitoring therefore requires a balance between standardisation and flexibility: a consistent set of core indicators that enables comparison across locations, combined with approaches that allow for contextual interpretation and locally relevant evidence.
To achieve this, the framework integrates three complementary sources of evidence:
Systematic field assessments provide the empirical foundation of the framework through geo-referenced, plot-based measurements of soil health, vegetation structure and composition, ground cover, and soil hydrologic function. These data establish baselines and provide ground-truthing for earth observation based models.
Pastoralist Knowledge (PK) contributes to a long-term, experience-based understanding of land health, ecosystem processes and environmental change that cannot be fully captured through periodic surveys or Earth observation alone. Integrating PK strengthens both the ecological validity and social legitimacy of the monitoring system.
Earth observation and data analytics extend monitoring across large and often remote landscapes, enabling the production of spatially explicit, high resolution predictive maps of key indicators and supporting the analysis of trends through time.
Together, these three evidence streams create a robust and scalable monitoring system in which field-based assessments provide direct measurements of ecological condition, PK contextualises scientific measurements and improves understanding, and Earth observation scales insights across broader complex landscapes while enabling the analysis of trends through time. Their integration offers a more complete understanding of rangeland health and change than any single approach could provide in isolation
