Progress report for WPDP24-018
Project Information
We are proposing to disseminate and support adoption of a state-of-the-art grazing capacity tool that can inform public and private rangeland grazing at a time when adaptive grazing management is needed to deal with invasive species, altered fire regimes, and semi-arid rangelands vulnerable to subtle climate shifts. Federal agencies often lack sufficient data describing vegetation performance to inform contentious public lands grazing decisions and revisions.
Prior stocking rate tools assume land managers have spatially accurate information on forage quantity on vast and heterogeneous landscapes. But in arid and semi-arid ecosystems the inherent interannual variability of precipitation and forage production is high, values are largely unknown and vary across the landscape, and these uncertainties complicate stocking rate decisions. This environmental variability also highlights the importance of animal distribution efforts, usually driven by grazing infrastructure such as watering sites and fences.
StockSmart incorporates historical forage production and variability with user-defined animal behavior prediction to permit spatially-explicit dynamic stocking calculations and grazing planning (Hudson et al., 2021). It also allows testing of scenarios of different infrastructure investments by quantifying expected changes in forage availability and quantity. These analyses are critical for federal and state agency National Environmental Policy Act permit renewals, grazing alternatives in Environmental Impact Statements, and calculations of grazing capacity for new grazing proposals.
The StockSmart team will conduct outreach on the proper use of this collaboratively-developed web application. We will focus effort on public agency personnel in the Western United States who make grazing decisions on federal, state, and tribal lands and technical service providers who advise landowners on the management of private grazing lands.
The primary project objectives are to build awareness of the existence and capabilities of StockSmart, and the data-derived calculations it provides, among rangeland professionals across 11 western States; ensure a diverse network of ranchers, public lands managers, technical service providers and consultants have the skills, training, and support they need to both use StockSmart themselves and to train others in its use; expand StockSmart capabilities so that advanced users can use it access other big data products that provide credible forage production estimates in their particular region.
We will design training such that participants better understand:
- precipitation and ANPP variability in lands they manage
- spatial heterogeneity of ANPP across lands they manage
- factors influencing livestock terrain use
- the need to constrain available forage estimates to areas actually accessed by livestock, which may be much less than total permitted or fenced area.
- factors in sustainable stocking rate and the wide variation in results based on multiple variables, see (Hudson et al., 2021).
- how to explore how much additional forage could become available given particular infrastructure improvements
- implications of alternative scenarios according to NEPA analysis
This understanding will enable users of the tool to:
- synthesize multiple sources of spatially-explicit forage production data with existing agency data on grazing history and utilization
- develop starting stocking rates using StockSmart and user-defined animal terrain use factors
- evaluate the full range of expected animal units against highly variable landscapes while balancing wildlife needs
- combine StockSmart results with prior grazing plans and rangeland condition and changes in vegetation cover over time to create future grazing plans with a broader set of data
- analyze proposed or possible infrastructure changes such as new cross-fence, revised management divisions using virtual fence, new stockwatering locations, adjusting class or breed or species of livestock, etc.
| Dates | Training | Web app development | Outcomes |
| Spring 2024 | Scope and plan training content. | Maintenance & review proposed revisions & enhancements. | |
| Summer 2024 | Develop webinar plans and dates for fall-winter training. | Initiate build on scoped enhancements | |
| Fall 2024 | Conduct training webinars with agencies. Use webinars to guide asychronous tutorial development. |
Continued development work toward 2.0 | Range professionals use StockSmart in designing grazing plans, permits, and NEPA renewals |
| Winter 2024-25 | Conduct training and promotional events with livestock industry partners and professional societies. Begin recording tutorials. |
Continued development work with team | Range professionals use StockSmart in designing grazing plans |
| Spring 2025 | Plan events with conservation district personnel. Tutorial recording & publishing. |
Testing in staging site with StockSmart 2.0 beta | |
| Summer 2025 | Conduct training events with conservation district personnel. Advertise tutorials. |
Deploy StockSmart 2.0 | CD personnel use StockSmart to improve accuracy of grazing plans inside conservation programs. Virtual fence users build virtual grazing areas using StockSmart planning and polygons. |
| Fall 2025 | Promotional events with industry. Promote tutorials & recorded webinars. |
Maintenance | |
| Winter 2025-26 | 2nd round of training with professional societies, using StockSmart 2.0 and promoting tutorials and case studies. |
Maintenance | |
| Spring 2026 | Monthly user webinar to provide support for federal/state agency and CD projects |
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| Summer 2026 | Support users, conduct second wave of popular media promotion of StockSmart |
Increase number of users; drive additional participation in asychronous training |
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| Fall 2026-Spring 2027 | Phone/videoconference interviews to gather adoption data and |
Cooperators
- - Producer
- (Researcher)
- - Producer
Education
We are conducting multi-part webinars with natural resource professionals in the Western U.S. to train end users on the use and applications of StockSmart. The webinars include required readings, hands-on learning, and learner demonstrations of their own grazing projects in StockSmart.
Education & Outreach Initiatives
The objectives for this workshop series are that participants will:
1. Gain understanding of the purpose of StockSmart, how StockSmart works, its input data and calculations, and how to use this tool to inform long-term sustainable grazing planning.
2. Gain practical experience using StockSmart for pastures or allotments they manage grazing on, how to interpret the resulting calculations, and how to compare these calculations to current grazing management in their pastures.
3. Develop a StockSmart project in pasture(s)/allotment(s) of their choice.
StockSmartWorkshopSeriesFullAgenda_20241024
During this series of four virtual workshops the team that developed StockSmart will share the details on the input data, the background and basis for the calculations StockSmart makes, and tips and guidance on how to use StockSmart for your particular grazing management decisions.
Webpage for webinar registration is https://csanr.wsu.edu/educational-opportunities/webinars/stocksmart/.
36 trainees participated in this webinar series. Add outcomes here when training evaluations synthesized.
Add functionality and value to Stock-Smart.com, responding to suggestions from beta testers and team evaluations.
The StockSmart team has made much headway into what has been branded as V2 of the StockSmart application. The team has gone through the discovery and requirements phase and nominated a suite a new upgrades. Three of those upgrades were categorized as "Top Priority" and due to their complexity required additional discovery, feasibility testing, and UI/UX prior to development and implementation. Here is a progress breakdown of each of those "Top Priority" upgrades:
- Functionality that allows users to choose different forage production inputs to use in StockSmart calculations.
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- Initial design and scaffolding has been completed to ensure our system can support dynamically switching between compatible forage production rasters.
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- Before seeking compatible third party data sources the team has decided on new variations of the RPMS data to provide end users with new insights.
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- E.g. Single years, groups of years
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- Next steps: render new RPMS rasters, research additional third party data sources
- Visualize rasters for downstream calculations, such as terrain correction layer (distance to water + slope corrections), and available forage.
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- Initial design and development has been completed
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- In an isolated V2 environment, the StockSmart application now has a pipeline to develop custom raster visualization based on the user input
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- Terrain Correction and Potentially Edible Forage rasters can now be dynamically generated upon each calculation
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- Next Steps: develop testing plan and launch data to release a BETA version of this new feature into the live application, develop render functions for additional rasters
- Functionality that allows user to easily and efficiently switch their geographical inputs between StockSmart and other platforms, with a particular focus on combining StockSmart calculations with virtual fencing decisions and implementation.
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- The need to export/import data out of StockSmart was in high demand so as an early implementation of this feature we decided to quickly build out a way of exporting all shapes from a StockSmart project as GeoJSON. This feature has already been deployed into the live application.
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- Next steps: continue the discovery phase for how StockSmart can officially partner with virtual fencing decision applications to make data transfer easier.
In combination to the "Top Priority" features above, additional ancillary upgrades have been worked on and scoped out. See the following:
- System and application upgrades
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- Within the V2 environment, all major dependencies of the software supporting StockSmart have been updated
- Calculation Model versioning
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- If major changes are made to the calculation model, the user must acknowledge these changes in the interface to ensure our commitment to transparency
- Optimizing know limitations
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- TBD
- Expanding forage demand variables to include a second class of livestock or wildlife
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- TBD