Environmentalists are raising concerns that health monitoring of public lands could be discontinued as a result of Trump administration staffing cuts amid already declining conditions across federal acreage used for grazing livestock.
The watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility highlighted the declining health of rangelands in a new analysis Thursday based on data compiled by the Bureau of Land Management.
“These numbers reveal a landscape under pressure,” Chandra Rosenthal, PEER’s Western lands and Rocky Mountain advocate, said in a statement.
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The analysis drew from BLM’s Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring (AIM) program data, which shows that healthy lands dropped from 72 percent in 2022 to 58 percent in 2024.
