Abstract
•Adaptive land management requires monitoring of resource conditions, which requires choices about where and when to monitor a landscape.•Designing a sampling design for a monitoring program can be broken down in to eight steps: identifying questions, defining objectives, selecting reporting units, deciding data collection methods, defining the sample frame, selecting an appropriate design type, deciding stratification and allocation, and identifying the required sampling effort.•Here, we provide descriptions of each step in the process and identify tools and resources to complete each step.