Landowner Collaborative Strategies for Nonlethal Predator Control

View the project final report

Commodities

• Animals: bovine, sheep

Practices

• Animal Production: animal protection and health, grazing management
• Natural Resources/Environment: wildlife
• Sustainable Communities: quality of life

Wildlife-livestock conflicts, such as depredation by predators, challenge the livelihoods of livestock producers (hereafter, ranchers). Protecting livestock from predators is a complex endeavor, and successful predator conflict mitigation practices require both an analysis of the efficacy of various practices and collaborative information sharing across invested stakeholders. Ranchers typically use an integrated management approach—primarily focusing on animal husbandry and ranch management, while also deploying mitigation practices to reduce depredation risks and lethal techniques when mitigation practices fail, and lethal control is authorized. Mitigation practices include human presence (e.g., range riders), deterrents (e.g., fladry), livestock management, and habitat manipulation, but there is limited scientific information on which practices are most effective and under what scenarios they succeed or fail. Ranchers also lack adequate resources to apply mitigation practices or share knowledge gained through experience. Through a diverse partnership of ranchers, scientists, conservation groups, and agencies with decades of experience with landowner collaborative strategies and predator conflict mitigation practices, we evaluated the effectiveness of range riding across western landscapes with grizzly bears and wolves, hosted opportunities for ranchers to exchange information about mitigation practices, and will disseminate information from our research and exchanges via scientific papers, extension articles, and traditional and novel education and outreach programming. We therefore pursued a co-production approach in what is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive project of its kind to date.

We focused on range riding because this practice is of high utility to ranchers, yet riding strategies vary widely. How and what works best is unclear, inhibiting adoption by more ranchers. Our research described and quantified the types and efficacy of range riding strategies, while rancher-to-rancher exchanges provided opportunities for foundational knowledge from years of rancher experience to be distributed more broadly. Published products will add scientific credibility to the findings and reinforce learning from exchanges through multiple and highly accessible outlets. We provided diverse outreach venues to facilitate new and improved use of predator conflict mitigation practices and add new users; we anticipated ranchers already using these practices would fine-tune their application for increased efficacy, while others would incorporate these practices into their management for the first time. Results of our study helped to create adaptive and integrative predator conflict mitigation practices disseminated to 600+ ranchers across 7+ states.

We used an iterative process to ensure successful implementation to improve sustainable agricultural practices. Information was continuously communicated among team members about the research, outreach, and rancher-to-rancher exchanges, which facilitated incremental changes in co-production processes and in how the practices are implemented by ranchers. This project has and will continue to create transformative change in agricultural sustainability by supporting a community of practice to research range riding across diverse social and ecological contexts in different grazing scenarios. We expect this framework to be applied to other mitigation practices and develop mechanisms for sustainable funding of such practices through NRCS-administered Farm Bill programs. Because we continuously coordinated with NRCS personnel and ranchers about how our research can be applied to decision-making surrounding funding for ranchers, our work helped to establish best practices for predator conflict mitigation that significantly improve sustainable agricultural production through incentivizing the adoption of proactive strategies. Importantly, the work resulted in $22 million for the implementation of the practices.

While some analyses for the research components are still ongoing, so far our preliminary work has yielded these key takeaways:

1. Cattle may be adapting their use of high forage availability areas in response to predator activity as a means to reduce predation risk. Whether this stress response is significant enough to impact livestock economics (e.g., reduced weaning weights, reduced cow body condition score, reduced pregnancy rates) will require more research.
2. Riders may not meaningfully reduce predator-induced stress and/or pressure in cattle to improve the use of high availability foraging areas, but finer scale analyses (spatiotemporally) may better assess livestock response to both rider and predator activity.
3. Rider deployment strategies should remain context-specific and adaptive rather than prescriptive.
4. Support the conflict mitigation approaches livestock producers advocate for - cultural and operational context, as well as uncertainty reduction, adaptive management, data collection, and improved coordination/communication are equally important effectiveness metrics for nonlethal tool adoption as effectiveness in reducing direct loss.

For the education and outreach portion, we have learned the following lessons: 

1. Building communities of practice amongst diverse stakeholders in conflict reduction can help support information exchange relevant to practice adoption for a host of practices, including range riding
2. Engagement of broad networks with effective, science and land-stewards centered communications can support increased knowledge of range riding and its application, and support cross-pollination of ideas within networks, building momentum for practice implementation. 
3. Landowners and livestock producers maintain knowledge of the land and stewardship practices that are not often captured in scientific research, or elevated for peer-to-peer learning. Incorporating this knowledge is both important for representative applied science, and for diffusion and implementation of practices such as range riding.

1. Improve ranch profitability through range riding, a predator conflict mitigation practice that is highly adaptable across diverse ranching operations.
   • Coproduce research to evaluate the cost and effectiveness of different range riding strategies across at least seven western states.
   • Incorporate data collected by researchers, ranchers, and local landowner groups to accomplish a robust evaluation of conflict reduction strategies.
2. Expand and integrate effective range riding strategies with adaptive conflict mitigation programs through rancher-to-rancher knowledge exchanges to support an enhanced quality of life for ranchers, livestock, and wildlife.
3. Elevate conservation planning and natural resources management within predator-occupied regions through co-interpretation and dissemination of project results on range riding and other conflict mitigation practices.
   • Synthesize research using metrics relevant to livestock production to indicate the value of range riding and other conflict mitigation practices to ranchers.
   • Provide data to NRCS to inform the development of new or modified conservation practices to incentivize broad adoption of conflict mitigation techniques.
4. Disseminate and amplify the collective experience and knowledge gained through this project by providing highly relevant content through a combination of traditional outreach programming (workshops, seminars) and novel outreach products, including audio, print, and digital platforms.