Jemez Pueblo Agriculture: Monitoring Rangeland Conditions to Inform Drought and Land Management in New Mexico

The Jemez Pueblo, a community located in the semi-arid high desert region of northcentral New Mexico,
faces challenges with drought mitigation and livestock management. NASA DEVELOP partnered with the
Pueblo of Jemez Natural Resources Department and The Nature Conservancy to provide recent and
historical rangeland conditions to aid present decision-making, which relies on cultural practices, site
familiarity, available resources, and physical data. This partnership offers the opportunity to support
management practices by leveraging remote sensing and virtual fencing technologies. Our project explored
Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP) products incorporating NASA Earth observation Landsat 5 TM, Landsat
7 ETM+, Landsat 8 OLI, and Landsat 9 OLI-2 remote-sensed imagery as an agricultural land management
tool. We performed linear regression analysis to evaluate RAP data to field data and explored RAP annual
herbaceous biomass, ground cover trends, and climatic factors at the pasture level. We then computed study
area summary statistics, performed pixel-by-pixel trend analysis across the study period, and evaluated ground cover trends near water sources. Based on available data, RAP was poorly correlated to bare ground and herbaceous biomass, generally underestimating the former and overestimating the latter. To improve the
evaluation of RAP products, we suggest increasing the spatiotemporal distribution of the field dataset.
According to RAP, from 1986 to 2023, the site became hotter and drier, bare ground increased, and annual
forbs and grasses increased while perennials decreased. RAP products did not agree with field-collected data;
however, the trends over time may be useful for informing rangeland management actions.