Guest post authored by Allison Holt, United States Forest Service

Since 2015, the US Forest Service has been using the Land Potential Knowledge System (LandPKS) to collect monitoring data in Ethiopia to develop a baseline for rangeland conditions and to evaluate the efficacy of rangeland management treatments in an adaptive management approach. As part of the USAID Pastoral Resilient Improved Market Expansion (PRIME) project, US Forest Service (USFS) ecologists Tom DeMeo and Sabine Mellman-Brown have been working with CARE Ethiopia Rangeland Specialists Gudina and Beressa Edessa to track local vegetation changes over time, and to record grazing effects and soil erosion trends. USFS has been conducted monitoring work primarily in the Borana, Guji, and Afar regions of Ethiopia, using both the LandPKS LandInfo and LandCover applications for electronic data collection and online cloud storage. To date, this work has resulted in 149 monitoring plots.