Kachergis and BLM AIM Team Honored by Society for Range Management with Outstanding Achievement Award

MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA – Emily Kachergis and the entire Bureau of Land Management Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) team received the Outstanding Achievement in Land Stewardship Award at the Society for Range Management’s 79th Annual Meeting in Monterey, California, last month. The Award is presented by the Society for Range Management for outstanding achievement to members and other qualified individuals and groups working with rangelands. 

The goal of AIM is to provide resource information for land management decision-making through standardized collection and analysis of data. AIM efforts span the entire BLM. AIM is supported by a team of specialists at the National Operations Center, coordinators in each state and field office, and many others across the BLM and partner organizations. This award recognizes everyone’s contributions.

Emily Kachergis and the BLM AIM team have fostered a collaborative approach to rangeland management and stewardship. In identifying monitoring as a “shared language for rangeland management”, Emily and the AIM team have worked hard to bridge divides in rangeland management using monitoring information as a tool to foster collaborative rangeland management.

Together, the AIM team and many partners have collected over 70,000 monitoring locations which have influenced management actions across millions of acres and contributed to over 300 scientific articles on rangeland management. AIM field data facilitated the development of fractional vegetation cover remote sensing products (e.g., Rangeland Analysis Platform, Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment and Projection), powerful new tools for understanding rangeland conditions across boundaries and through time. AIM data also contributed to refinement of ecological site descriptions, state and transition models, web-based decision support dashboards, and many other tools widely used in the rangeland management profession.

The contributions of this team span the challenges of rangeland management, from understanding wildfire risk and postfire restoration effectiveness, sage grouse habitat management, drought response, grazing management, and energy development. For example – AIM led to a better understanding of cheatgrass abundance, its relationship to fire, and what we should do about it.