Monitoring of rangelands has evolved from traditional focus on plant communities and their successional status, taken from a few selected subsamples, to much broader perspectives. Rangelands, being complex biosocial systems, offer a near infinite array of possibilities for choice of variables and how to collect and interpret the data. Past monitoring approaches have inadequately considered objectives, critical definitions, and appropriate sequencing of steps taken. While management objectives should ideally have primacy in choice of variables used in inventory and monitoring, there are some countervailing advantages in employing some commonalities in monitoring protocols among tracts of rangelands. Inventories should come before monitoring...