Land Stewardship & Management
Healthy land is essential for both livestock and wildlife, providing vital ecosystem services we all depend on. Land managers need solid information to make smart decisions about grazing, brush control, prescribed burns, and more. Our goal is to understand these ecosystems better, develop strategies to improve them, and track how our management affects the land through changing conditions.
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 into 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 the 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 the 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.
