Revolutionizing rangeland management: the power of RAP

Healthy rangelands are essential for ensuring grazing and forage productivity, reducing wind erosion and wildfire risks, and supporting wildlife ecosystems. Covering about 30% of the United States’ land, these vast areas mainly consist of grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, and savannas.

Maintaining these rangelands can be challenging. Early signs of soil and vegetation stress, the spread of invasive grass, increased risk of wildfire, and the emerging pests might go unnoticed without the proper monitoring and management. To help keep their rangelands healthy and productive, land managers have increasingly turned to advanced technology, like satellite remote-sensing tools to provide near-real time maps about rangeland condition and productivity.

The Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP) was launched in 2018 and has made advanced remote-sensing technology more accessible to ranchers, producers, land managers, and researchers, revolutionizing the way these vast landscapes can be managed and monitored. It is a free online tool that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate detailed maps showing rangeland vegetation cover and vegetation production across the United States. By combining satellite remote-sensing data with field measurements of vegetation, RAP can provide information dating back to 1984.

The ARS Range Management Research Unit, in Las Cruces, NM, officially took stewardship of RAP in 2023, and the researchers continue to innovate in collaboration with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Bureau of Land Management, Farm Services Agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the University of Montana, to enhance its capabilities so it remains a valuable tool.

Recently, researchers made significant improvements to RAP by using higher resolution images captured by the Sentinel-2 mission, which provides a 10-meter cover dataset. The Sentinel-2 mission utilizes three satellites to produce more detailed images with finer resolution and faster updates than the previous 30-meter datasets. These enhanced images offer a more precise understanding of rangeland vegetation structure and composition, covering the period from 2018 to 2024. 

This new satellite dataset allows RAP to provide new cover information, specifically invasive species, pinyon-juniper, sagebrush, as well as the distribution of bare ground. These new RAP layers allow ranchers and land managers to detect and manage invasive species spread and consequent wildfire risks, woody species encroachment, wildlife habitat condition, and wind erosion risks with high precision across the western United States. 

It will also enable ranchers to maintain and improve rangeland productivity. For example, ranchers and ARS researchers are working together to develop new tools that use RAP, in conjunction with other precision ranching tools, to manage cattle movement and forage utilization across extensive rangelands, helping them reduce operational costs and maximize livestock production. 

RAP's 30-meter cover data will remain available to its more than 25,000 active users for historical information. However, with the new high-resolution model, users can make more informed management decisions that benefit United States’ agriculture and food production. — by Maribel Alonso, ARS Office of Communications.