Much of the grassland ecosystem worldwide is utilized as rangeland to graze animals such as cattle and sheep. Indeed, rangeland is one of the largest land uses in the United States. Therefore, maintaining the health of our grassland ecosystem is critical for the well-being of both people and nature. We are working with ranchers across the United States to identify range management practices that can enhance rangeland resilience to extensive droughts and promote rangeland as a habitat for wildlife.

Grazing Management for Drought Resilience

Patch Burn Grazing

 

Grazing Management for Drought Resilience
​(GMDR)

Projected climate change is currently threatening our nation’s rangelands, and discovering and adopting best management practices for this changing climate is critical. We are working in the rangeland of Montana and Wyoming to (1) experimentally examine the interactive effects of drought intensity and grazing management to determine mechanisms underlying rangeland resiliency in the face of a changing climate, and (2) facilitate implementation of best-management practices by integrating rangeland managers in the project from beginning to end.

Traditionally, experimental manipulations have focused on either environmental manipulations or management manipulations. In this work, we are experimentally testing drought-management interactions in northern mixed-grass rangeland, which represents the largest ecoregion in the United States. Our research examines the mechanisms underlying rangeland responses to drought and management, including plant and soil components. The interactive drought management and gradient approach of our experiment will help identify best management practices for a variety of future climate scenarios.

 

Patch Burn Grazing

Frequently, cattle production comes at the expense of plant and wildlife biodiversity, with cattle management goals at odds with environmental health and conservation. Patch burn grazing is a new management strategy that promises land owners the ability to prioritize cattle weight gain and promote conservation and sustainability practices simultaneously. Patch burn grazing employs fire and grazing interactions to create a “shifting mosaic” of forage across a landscape through time. In an unfenced management unit, fire is used to lure grazing animals to a portion (patch) of the unit that has recently burned, while unburned patches experience reduced levels of grazing. The patchiness of disturbances across a patch burn grazing landscape leads to heterogeneity of vegetation, which is predicted to be important for ecosystem health. Importantly, in addition to its purported benefits for wildlife and natural resources, patch burn grazing still provides equivalent cattle production to more traditional management practices, such as annual burning. Yet evidence for many of the potential benefits of patch burn grazing for bird, small mammal, insect, and plant communities is limited or equivocal, and patch burn grazing’s belowground effects (e.g., soil health, carbon sequestration) remain completely unexplored. With this project, we aim to examine the effects of patch burn grazing on the health and sustainability of a grazing ecosystem.