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The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) is the largest monument in the continental United States. Located in southern Utah, the Monument was created in 1996 by Presidential Proclamation to protect 1.9 million acres of remote wilderness. As part of the Colorado Plateau, the Monument is bounded by Capital Reef National Park, Dixie National Forest, Bryce Canyon National Park, and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Its vast landscape embraces a dramatic array of scientific and historic resources, presenting extraordinary opportunities for geologists, paleontologists, archeologists, historians, and biologists. Spanning five life zones from low-lying desert to coniferous forest, with scarce and scattered water sources, the Monument is an outstanding biological resource.

The blending of warm and cold desert floras, along with the high number of endemic species, make this the richest floristic region in the Intermountain West. The area contains an abundance of unique, isolated communities such as hanging gardens, tinajas, rock crevices, canyon bottoms, and dunal pocket communities, which have provided refugia for many ancient plant and insect species for millennia.

A variety of geologic and soil strata, each with unique physical and chemical characteristics, support many different vegetative communities and numerous types of endemic plants and their pollinators. This presents an exceptional opportunity to study plant speciation and community dynamics independent of climatic variables. Fragile cryptobiotic crusts play a critical role throughout the monument, stabilizing the highly erodible desert soils and providing nutrients to plants. These are just a few of the qualities that greatly enhance the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument's value for scientific study.

The cooperative efforts of the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL), and the GSENM staff are focused on providing scientific data to assist the BLM with their management objectives. Specific management issues we will address are: (1) Identifying hot spots of native plant diversity and rare/unique habitats; (2) Determining areas where cryptobiotic crusts and plant communities are particularly sensitive to disturbance; (3) Detecting the loss of native plant diversity caused by exotic plants; and (4) Developing a science-based long-term monitoring plan for vegetation and soil resources.