WSP01334

• File Number: 8273.400
• Description: Colorado River Basin Salinity Control - Federal Agencies - Bureau of Land Management
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Water Division: 5
• Date: 11/1/1996
• Author: BLM
• Title: Decision Record and Finding of No Significant Impact for Adoption of Standards for Public Land Health and Guidelines for Livestock Grazing Management in Colorado
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: EIS

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STANDARDS
FOR PUBLIC LAND HEALTH

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AND

GUIDELINES
FOR LIVESTOCK GRAZING MANAGEMENT

IN COLORADO
November 1996

PREAMBLE

Humans use and derive benefits from public lands administered by BlM in Colorado in many ways:
to earn a livelihood, to recreate, for education, for science, and to enjoy and appraciate open splices
and irreplaceable cultural heritage resources. Healthy public iands and the uses of those lands
contribute to the health and economic well-being of Colorado communities. In turn, healthy human
communities create healthy public lands by conserving, protecting, and properly utilizing public land
resources and by effectively resolving conservation issues. Healthy public la.nds and healthy human
communities are interrelated; therefore, social, economic, and environmental considerations must be
properly balanced.

The interdependent relationShip between human communities and their pUblic land brings together
people of diverse backgrounds and interests. Open,.honest, and sincere interactions, .In a spirit of
trust and respect, are essential to achieving and maintaining healthy public lands. While all
individuals have a voice in public land management goals, the responsibility to maintain healthy
public lands ultimately falls with the user~ of those lands.

To help determine what constitutes healthy public lands, Standards for Public.land Health, by
which the health pf the land is measured, need to be established. This dpcument defines such
standards for Bllll1lands in Colorado. It also identifies Guidelines for Livestock Grazina
Manaaement, which are some of the tools that help achieve the standards.

INTERPRETATION

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Standards and guidelines can be an effective communication tool, providing a common
understanding of expected resource conditions and acceptable management practices. Although
the standards are the measures by which health of the land wili be assessed, the results of these
assessments are not well-suited for direct reporting of accomplishments. Any reporting of progress
associated with application of these standards wili need to consider and address the following
factors:
- Standards and guidelines for each state will be different.
- To be meaningful, public land health assessment must be determined based upon all
standards and not solely upon each individual standard.
- It wili be many years before a full assessment of public land health is completed. Initially,
statistics concerning public land health may be skewed due to the priority setting process
which directs management attention to lands where problems exist.

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