Soil and Water Indicators of the Sustainable Rangelands Roundtable

The Sustainable Rangelands Roundtable (SRR) has explicitly included conservation and maintenance of soil and water resources as a criterion, a category of conditions or processes that can be assessed nationally to determine if the current level of rangeland management will ensure sustainability. Within the soil/water criterion, 10 indicators, 5 soil-based and 5 water-based, were developed through the expert opinions of rangeland scientists, rangeland management agency personnel, non-governmental organization representatives, practitioners, and other interested stakeholders. Out of these 10, 5 were judged by the soil/water criterion group members as being most expedient for a future national level U.S.A. report on rangeland sustainability. The soil and water indicators are not inclusive, but provide a suite of variables, that when complemented with indicators from the 4 other criteria of SRR, produce a viable system to monitor at the national level the biophysical, social, and economic characteristics indicating trends of sustainability on rangelands.