Enabling Smart Users of Big Landscapes with Stocksmart, a Decision Support Tool for Rangeland Professionals

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Commodities

Practices

• Animal Production: rangeland/pasture management, stocking rate
• Education and Training: decision support system

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.