Agency Field Data Paints Bleak Picture of Western Lands
Discover the Bureau of Land Management's Public Land Assessments
The Bureau of Land Management is the largest land management agency, responsible for 245 million acres of our nations’ public lands in 13 western states. 155 million acres of this land is leased to the public for livestock grazing.
BLM lands, Blue Mass area in Pleasant Valley Nevada
BLM staff, usually range specialists, assess the land health of the 21,000 grazing allotments.
Depending on the outcome of an assessment, BLM may be required to make management decisions like changing the terms of a lease, the amount of time that livestock can be on the land, or the number of livestock permitted on the land.
Through public record requests, PEER gathered the assessments from each state and field office. The results of the agency's field work are now available to the public and compiled in a visual centralized map.
The image of the BLM data shows us that many of our public lands are failing to meet the agency's own rangeland health standards.
BLM has recorded approximately 54 million acres of public land as failing to meet land health standards.
Of the 54 million acres of failing lands, BLM attributes grazing as a cause in 72% of the allotments.
Nevada has some of the highest percentage of lands that fail to meet the agency's standards of healthy lands.
Consider this allotment.
BLM range specialists strategically place vegetation traps on the allotments. This allows them to compare a protected spot to an unprotected area. Outside of the "range cage" wildlife and livestock graze.
This range cage is on the Tippett Pass public land allotment in Nevada.
The valley should be filled with the plant winterfat, scrub, and Indian rice grass that is found within the range cage.
Instead, livestock grazing on fragile high desert soils during persistent drought has resulted in empty, bare land.
These sheep are grazing illegally, outside of the terms of the permit, on the Tippett Pass allotment. There is so little forage available to the sheep that they are eating the woody stalks of the last remaining forage.
BLM has yet to assess this 77,000 acre grazing allotment.
There are huge swaths of land that BLM has not assessed. The rangeland health program began in 1997, but according to BLM data, nearly 41 million acres have not been assessed--that is 27% of all of the leased allotments.
The Rock Springs parcel in Wyoming is a 2 million acre allotment, of which 950,000 acres are public lands that are leased for livestock grazing. BLM classified this allotment as failing rangeland health standards due to livestock.
BLM records attribute overgrazing as the cause of failure on approximately 39 million acres of public land. From the years of records that we have collected and centralized, you can see that many failing allotments go year after year without BLM adjusting lease terms to reflect the carrying capacity of the fragile landscape.
Lands failing Land Health Standards due to livestock in 2020. Click on an allotment to view land health data from 2007 and 2012.
BLM data show that certain regions are more susceptible to impacts from livestock leasing.
60% of the allotment lands that BLM has assessed lie within the enormous Cold Deserts ecoregion. In this single ecoregion, BLM's identifies an astonishing 40% of these lands as failing due to impacts from livestock.
Policy decisions should be based on the most accurate and current data available.
BLM has a large-scale program to remove entire herds of wild horses from public lands. Though the agency attributes land health damage to horses, when you look at the data and see what each field office reports, a more complicated picture emerges. With the PEER map you can overlay the BLM defined Herd Management Areas over the landscape health data.
BLM identified horses as a cause of a parcel's failing condition, but in the vast majority of instances, about 80% of the time, horses are listed in conjunction with livestock.
PEER LHS 2020
The centralized data can be used with overlays of wildlife populations. Sage-grouse chick to hen ratios have been declining in Wyoming and are heading back toward levels of the 1990s. Part of this is cyclical, but the BLM data reveals that much of the birds’ habitat is in poor condition.
In this map, the BLM data is overlaid with Sage-grouse habitat. The red and orange areas contain 50% of the breeding bird population range wide. Allotments that the BLM has identified as “failing” are in black. The failing lands are in the the central habitat of the bird.
Figure 1. Greater Sage-grouse Breeding Bird Densities (25% red, 50% - orange, 75% - green, 100% - blue). Chick survival rate is declining in Wyoming at an alarming rate (High Country News, Wyoming sage grouse numbers ‘alarming’, Angus M. Thuermer Jr. Jan. 11, 2022), and is expected to hit a low in 2022, heading back to 1990’s levels.
We welcome you to use our interactive web-based map.
This user friendly tool will allow you to examine the land health of our public lands using the rich geodatabase that we have created for the public.
Owens Peak BLM Wilderness in the southern Sierra Nevada range in California.
