Land Stewardship & Management
Land is the foundation on which livestock and wildlife depend, and the land provides several other essential ecosystem services. The importance of intact, functioning landscapes cannot be overstated – we rely as a society on the products and services provided by working lands. Stewards of these resources face complex decisions and demand reliable information to generate the best outcomes. Management inputs like grazing, brush management, and prescribed fire are key tools, and we aim to discover the mechanisms that drive these ecosystems, develop management strategies that improve their condition over time, and document the outcomes of management action in the face of environmental variability.
Landscape Monitoring
We conduct semi-annual vegetation surveys to document the state of our land, and to provide a data series that gives us insight about the effects of management actions and environmental variables on trends in productivity, structure, and composition of vegetation on the landscape. We develop new and innovative methods for landscape-level monitoring, to better inform management at scale.
Carrying Capacity
Livestock and wildlife depend on the primary productivity of the land, and developing management strategies that result in improvements in carrying capacity over time is a key objective of land stewardship. Rangelands are dynamic – even in the absence of management action, they change over time, and advancing stewardship demands that we discover the mechanisms of change and harness this knowledge to develop effective management strategies to ensure long term viability of these systems.
Ecosystem Services
The public benefits of land stewardship include the variety of ecosystem services provided by intact, functioning landscapes. Today, there is broad societal interest in some of these services, such as the role of rangelands in carbon sequestration, the global carbon balance, and the benefits of biodiversity for the functioning and resilience of ecosystems. We explore these topics to better translate the role of land stewardship for society in the context of a working landscape.
Landscape Ecology
Developing effective stewardship strategies depends on our understanding of the ecological systems and function of our rangelands. The development, function, and responses of plant associations and communities and how they respond over time to disturbances like prescribed fire and drought are foundational to management decisions. By developing large scale classification and characterization of our landscapes, we can define ‘land management units’ that serve as replicates in our experiments and make our entire operating footprint a robust living laboratory.
