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Road Decommisioning
Carolyn Napper, Soils Scientist

Inventory and Monitoring

The Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) defines inventory as the systematic acquisition, analysis, and organization of resource information needed for planning and implementing land management.

Inventory poses the following questions: what it is? Where is it? And how much is there? With these questions answered, the interdisciplinary team knows the condition of the road, geographic distribution, extent, and amount of work required.

The Society of Range Managers defines monitoring as the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of resource data to evaluate progress toward meeting management objectives. (Adapted from SRM 1989)

Monitoring poses the following questions: How is the resource changing over time? Is the resource moving toward or away from stated objectives? To answer these questions a monitoring plan identifies indicators and threshold values that show change.

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