This user's manual focuses on the development of new monitoring techniques that have been implemented at the U.S. Army’s National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California. It was designed to address diagnostic capabilities needed to distinguish between various degrees of sustainable and non-sustainable impacts due to military training and testing and habitat-disturbing activities in desert ecosystems. Techniques described in this manual focus on the use of high-resolution imagery and the application of image-processing techniques used to measure vegetation in arid lands.