Supporting outcome-based management on private & public rangelands: training agricultural professionals on monitoring techniques

View the project final report

Commodities

Practices

• Animal Production: grazing management, rangeland/pasture management
• Education and Training: demonstration, workshop
• Natural Resources/Environment: indicators

Livestock grazing is an important land use throughout the western US, and ranchers need to make management decisions quickly in response to current conditions. The University of Idaho’s Rangeland Center identified land use policies limiting ranchers’ flexibility to account for annual variations in forage, water, disturbance, and market conditions as a challenge to sustainably managing Idaho’s rangelands. This has led to an effort by the Center to develop an “outcome-based management” paradigm that would give ranchers more flexibility to make management decisions regarding grazing on private and leased public lands. However, the success of such adaptive management will hinge on quickly and accurately assessing condition of rangelands and coordinating monitoring activities between ranchers and public land managers. Outcome-based management will require a new paradigm for monitoring rangelands that adds easy-to-implement quantitative methods to existing monitoring, leverages the ability to combine monitoring data from different sources, and emphasizes cooperative monitoring between ranchers and public agencies. Achieving this in Idaho will require developing significant training and support materials for ranchers and rangeland professionals. This project’s objectives were: 1) consolidate existing training materials for three monitoring techniques (photo monitoring, LandPKS, BLM quantitative monitoring) into consistent formats emphasizing understanding and interpreting monitoring indicators and method implementation; 2) demonstrate the compatibility of the rapid LandPKS method with other methods used by BLM, and illustrate how methods can be used together for monitoring grazing effects in outcome-based management; 3) develop training modules for using the three methods together for management decision making; and 4) host workshops for ranchers and rangeland professionals on the suite of monitoring tools and how they can be used together. The project goal was to increase ranchers’ awareness and use of compatible rangeland monitoring programs in Idaho and increase the success of outcome-based rangeland management.

The goal of this project was to provide training on and demonstration of rangeland monitoring methods that could be used in outcome-based management in Idaho. This project focused on developing training materials for three monitoring techniques (photo monitoring, LandPKS, BLM quantitative monitoring) and illustrating how those techniques can be used together by ranchers and public land managers to support sustainable grazing. Specific project objectives were:

Refactor existing training materials for photo points, LandPKS, and BLM quantitative monitoring into consistent, modular formats that emphasized: 1) understanding the indicators and how to interpret the data, 2) understanding how the techniques work, and 3) learning how to implement the techniques.

Demonstrate the compatibility of the LandPKS methods with a set of quantitative methods used by BLM and illustrate how data from all three methods (photo monitoring, LandPKS, and quantitative indicators) can be used together for monitoring grazing effects for outcome-based management.

Develop training modules for how to use the three different sources of monitoring data together for management decision making.

Develop and host workshops for NRCS Specialists and Extension Educators, ranchers, and agency land managers on the suite of monitoring tools and how they can be used together.

Develop and launch a training hub on the LandPKS website to host video and other online training materials on how to implement and use the LandPKS method.