The Rocky Mountain Research Station Research units at the Rocky Mountain Research Station are located across the Interior Western U.S. and focus on ecosystems of the Rocky Mountains, Great Basin, Great Plains and Southwest. In addition to research supporting inventory and monitoring, we study topics related to wildlife and fish, air quality, integrated adaptive management of natural resources, wilderness, ecological restoration, vegetation ecology and management, fire, watershed, riparian and aquatics research, disturbance ecology, and human dimensions in natural resource management. The Challenge of Inventory and Monitoring Systematic inventory and monitoring of natural resources is a fundamental requirement for managing ecological systems to achieve sustainability.
Inventory involves collecting and aggregating resource information.
Monitoring is the systematic evaluation of a management decision to determine if we achieved the desired results or to detect deviations from an expected result. Scientists are developing innovative and widely accepted monitoring methods and providing specialized, statistical support to solve problems for regional and national inventory units. The station has inventory responsibility on the 136 million acres of forest lands in the Interior West.