Building a Framework to Assess Restoration Outcomes for the Department of the Interior

Ecosystem restoration across the Department of Interior

The National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other DOI bureaus and offices manage lands on behalf of the American public. As part of their land management responsibilities, DOI bureaus invest in restoration and improvements on public lands. Targeted ecosystem restoration strengthens economies, such as agriculture and fisheries; supports recreation, including hunting and fishing; and reduces risks associated with natural hazards, such as prolonged drought, wildfire, or floods. DOI and its bureaus coordinate and leverage restoration investments to achieve benefits at larger scales. Most recently, DOI coordinated with bureaus to implement hundreds of ecosystem restoration projects across the United States. This effort presents a unique opportunity to support DOI in assessing restoration outcomes across DOI lands and ensure the effective application of public funds.

Barriers to landscape-level restoration outcomes assessments

A key challenge to assessing restoration outcomes across a landscape is that ecological monitoring efforts, including implementation and effectiveness monitoring, vary substantially among bureaus, programs, offices, ecosystems, and projects. Without common data standards and shared indicators of restoration success across land units, programs, and bureaus, it is difficult to assess broader patterns in restoration outcomes across jurisdictional boundaries or landscapes. Developing shared goals, indicators, monitoring protocols, and data standards will enable land managers to leverage existing monitoring data from other bureaus or programs to assess when and where restoration actions may have a higher likelihood of being effective, and to assess outcomes resulting from management actions.  

The need for a national framework to assess restoration outcomes

The goal of this project is to develop a foundational, cross-bureau framework with shared measures across DOI for assessing a subset of restoration project outcomes at the landscape level. We aim to develop an approach that facilitates consistent and coordinated assessment of restoration outcomes, and provides insight into restoration successes and failures.

Specific aims: 

• Develop a restoration outcomes assessment framework.
• Develop a data infrastructure for collecting, storing, summarizing, displaying, and disseminating restoration monitoring data.
• Test the framework on a subset of restoration actions.

A central emphasis of this work is cross-bureau collaboration and coordination. The USGS is leading the development of this framework in partnership with several DOI offices and bureaus, including the Office of Planning and Performance Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Development of the restoration outcomes assessment framework

We are building from existing science and external products and frameworks, such as the Society for Ecological Restoration’s Restoration Project Information Sharing Framework, to ensure the framework is translatable to different landscapes and geographies. In addition, this effort is leveraging existing DOI projects and products, such as the Conservation Efforts Database, a spatially explicit database tracking species conservation actions; the Land Treatment Digital Library, a catalog of land treatments on federal lands; and the Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment and Projection, annual maps of rangeland vegetation from 1985 to present that display changes in landscape health over time. 

To develop this outcomes assessment framework, the project approach will include the following steps: 1) selecting demonstration areas that present the best opportunity to test the framework; 2) identifying restoration goals and indicators that are relevant for cross-bureau, landscape-level restoration; 3) building an inventory of restoration monitoring approaches to determine opportunities for coordination across bureaus and geographies; and 4) developing a restoration monitoring data infrastructure to collect, visualize, and summarize cross-bureau monitoring data related to restoration implementation and effectiveness. To assess restoration outcomes across the landscape, this effort will use a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures including remotely sensed data and existing on-the-ground monitoring data to test the framework on select case studies. Deliverables will include methods for developing landscape-level restoration goals and indicators, a report indicating lessons learned from building the initial framework, and an assessment of remaining data and resources needed to enable an expansion of the framework to a broader set of geographies and restoration goals. Ultimately, the project will serve as the foundational step to a long-term, durable, DOI-wide approach for assessing and delivering restoration impact to the communities and wildlife that depend on healthy landscapes and rangelands.