Science based conservation is the key to managing agricultural landscapes for environmental quality.

The Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) is a multi-agency effort to scientifically quantify the environmental benefits of conservation practices used by private landowners participating in U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and other conservation programs. Project findings will guide USDA conservation policy and program development and help farmers and ranchers to make informed conservation choices.

The three principal components of CEAP — the national assessment, the watershed assessment studies, and the bibliographies and literature reviews — contribute to the evolving process of building the science base for conservation. That process includes research, monitoring and data collection, modeling, and assessment.

The technologies that NRCS brings to our technical assistance on rangeland, pastureland, and grazed forestland are built upon the scientific understanding developed by our federal agency partners, land grant universities, nongovernmental organizations and other cooperators and scientists.

Because fish and wildlife are affected by conservation actions on a variety of landscapes on grazing lands, CEAP will carefully examine these interactions.

This national assessment will also use data collected for the National Resources Inventory (NRI) Rangeland Field Study to populate the WEPP/RHEM/AGWA (Water Erosion Prediction Project/Rangeland Hydrology and Erosion Model). A new NRI Pastureland data collection protocol is being tested summer 2007. Because of the very diverse ecosystems represented by grazing lands, a regional approach will be used to set up sideboards for future studies, dividing landscapes by the Great Plains, Intermountain west, Desert southwest, Pacific, and Eastern settings.

Resource management systems dominated by prescribed grazing, prescribed burning, brush management, and rangeland seeding will be evaluated early in the process.