role of stakeholders and BLM staff, and facilitating meetings. She also created and manages the group website and is in the process of conducting a stakeholder analysis. At this point, several members of the group find it hard to imagine what it would be like working without a mediator. Overall direction of the group, meeting management, tone and comfort of participants, ability to address fairly sensitive issues, and documentation of meetings has improved as a result of Tahnee’s involvement in the biological planning process (Kay 2012).
Design of management interventions and monitoring protocol The RMP outlines goals, objectives, management actions and monitoring strategies. The SVPP based objectives on a land health standard defined for each habitat-type (based on NRCS Ecological Site Descriptions and Arizona Standards for Rangeland Health). Objectives are timebound and specify what is trying to be accomplished. For example, one objective is to maintain or achieve <30% exposed soil surface (bare ground) in 80% or more of grassland ecological sites in the planning area by 2015 (BLM 2003). Another objective is to maintain or achieve a high similarity index (>50%, by weight) to historic climax plant communities in 80% or more of the ecological sites in the planning area by 2015 (BLM 2003). Once the group identified the desired conditions for each habitat-type, they used stateand-transition models to highlight the major driving forces of change that impact the conditions of an ecological site (Figure 7). They also used the models to identify appropriate management strategies for moving a site with undesired conditions towards a more desired state and preventing sites already in desired states from transitioning into less desired ones.
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