Rangelands in the United States are diverse lands. They are the wet grasslands of Florida to the desert shrub ecosystems of Wyoming. They include the high mountain meadows of Utah to the desert floor of California.
The United States has about 770 million acres of rangelands. Private individuals own more than half of the Nation's rangelands. The federal government manages 43 percent of the rangelands. State and local governments manage the remainder.
The Forest Service, an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture, administers approximately 191 million acres of National Forest Systems lands. About half of this acreage, 96 million acres, is rangelands.
These diverse ecosystems produce an equally diverse array of tangible and intangible products. Tangible products include forage for grazing and browsing animals, wildlife habitat, water, minerals, energy, recreational opportunities, some wood products, and plant and animal genes. These are important economic goods. Rangelands produce intangible products such as natural beauty and wilderness, satisfying important societal values. These are often as economically important as the more tangible commodities.
Several datasets that can be found in the Raster Data Warehouse can be downloaded from the links below. Other datasets can be downloaded from the Research Data Archive.
Dataset:
Extent of coterminous U.S. rangelands
This raster dataset depicts rangelands in the coterminous U.S., including transitional rangelands and small patch-size rangelands. Each 30 meter pixel is assigned a land cover category, including Rangeland, Afforested Rangeland (experiencing encroachment by trees [> 25% tree cover]) and Transitional Rangeland (currently dominated by herbs or shrubs that will likely become forested without management intervention).
Rangeland is land primarily composed of grasses, forbs, or shrubs. This includes lands vegetated naturally or artificially to provide a plant cover managed like native vegetation and does not meet the definition of pasture. The area must be at least 1.0 acre in size and 120.0 feet wide.
Rangeland extent is an important factor for evaluating critical indicators of rangeland sustainability. Rangeland areal extent was determined for the coterminous United States in a geospatial framework by evaluating spatially explicit data from the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE) project describing historic and current vegetative composition, average height, and average cover through the viewpoint of the National Resources Inventory (NRI) administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Three types of rangelands were differentiated using the NRI definition encompassing rangelands, afforested rangelands, and transitory rangelands.
This dataset describes annual productivity in the non-forest domain of the coterminous United States. Production data were generated using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Thematic Mapper Suite from 1984 to 2023 at 250 m2 resolution. This dataset yields estimates of annual production of rangeland vegetation in pounds per acre and should be useful for understanding trends and variability in forage resources anywhere rangelands are common. There is an individual raster for each year included in the study (1984–2023). Separate data are available for the productivity in pounds per acre as well as the z-scores (standard deviations from the mean), available through 2023, which allow for easier comparison of annual relative productivity in coterminous U.S. rangelands. More information about rangeland productivity and the effects of drought are available in this story map.
