The Landscape Toolbox was developed to help land managers and researchers discover, learn about, apply, and integrate methods and technologies for better rangeland management. The Landscape Toolbox integrates existing and emerging field, remote sensing, and ecosystem modeling tools and methods in support of rangeland assessment, monitoring, and planning. The vision of the Landscape Toolbox project is to achieve better ecosystem management at landscape scales by cooperating with public and private partners to develop and synthesize data into working ecological knowledge systems.

The Landscape Toolbox project began with two concepts: 1) there are many different techniques, tools, methods, data sources, and models available to aid rangeland management 2) with a few notable exceptions, these tools are not seeing widespread use. The reasons these tools are not being widely used are varied, but two reasons were a lack of general understanding as to what the different tools/methods did and when it was appropriate to use them and the absence of any sort of system to integrate different techniques into a workflow that could address management or monitoring objectives. As a result, the USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range and the Idaho Chapter of The Nature Conservancy are working with public and private land management partners to develop the Landscape Toolbox for describing and integrating ecological analysis and monitoring tools that are designed to enable better rangeland management at landscape scales. The goal of the Landscape Toolbox is to realize better ecosystem management by integrating existing and emerging field, remote sensing, and ecosystem modeling methods for rangeland assessment, monitoring, and planning.