I had the opportunity to assist in a few rangeland health assessments with our range peoples in the office lately.  This was a great new experience and another weapon in the arsenal of experience this internship has given me.  These rangeland health assessments are done as part of the permit renewal on pasture allotments every ten years.  The assessment consists of evaluating seventeen attributes of an area such as hydrology, erosion, and biotic integrity.  The process starts by running a point step transect with one hundred points and marking what was hit on a form.  Next hooping and clipping is done to measure productivity and then the seventeen attributes can be assessed.  The process is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data used to give an idea of the pastures quality at that point in time.  The assessment is not used to measure what management practices should be taken on the land, it is simply a picture in time of the condition of the pasture.  The assessments are done multiple times throughout the pasture allotment the areas are selected randomly in order to get a representative idea of the pasture allotment.  Until next time people of the internet!