The Art of Range

How do undergrazing and overgrazing affect soil carbon change? What does "optimal grazing" look like? This sequel episode with Paige Stanley goes deeper into the ways grazing factors affect the ecophysiology elements that are responsible for generating or release the various kinds of soil carbon. These changes remain difficult to quantify, but we can describe them. Listen in on this second interview from Dr. Stanley's review paper "Ruminating on soil carbon: Applying current understanding to inform grazing management."

Transcript and links are available at the episode page: https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-142-understanding-grazing-effects-soil-carbon-sequel-dr-paige-stanley.

"The fields of rangeland and wildlife management are brothers in the same fight for the conservation, protection, and management of wildlife and one cannot be completely understood without knowledge of the other." --Paul Krausman. This quote from the foreword of a new edited volume on wildlife ecology highlights the integrated nature of rangeland science. Listen to Drs. Lance McNew and Jeff Beck describe what's in this Springer-published comprehensive guide to what we know about rangeland wildlife, from mice to mule deer, sparrows to sage grouse. Wildlife species require habitat, and habitat management requires broad understanding and thinking. Take a look at this book.

Transcript and links mentioned in this episode are at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-141-new-rangeland-wildlife-ecology-conservation-reference-manual-lance-mcnew-jeff-beck.

Meet Mark and Wendy Pratt, ordinary people doing unglamorous work with extraordinary care. C.S. Lewis said "we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. It is frustrating . . . to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch." We are quick to praise teachers and medical professionals like nurses because their work involves mundane faithfulness to work that is good for society and they are largely unthanked. Ranchers doing the daily work of caring for the living skin of the earth, work that involves wildlife habitat conservation, food production, open space protection, and much more, are sometimes treated worse than the tin can in the ditch -- at least the can is unnoticed -- ranchers are often vilified. We could begin by judging this group of people by their best representatives instead of their worst. I hope you will share my enjoyment of Mark & Wendy by listening to them describe their care for all creatures great and small and the land that supports us all.

TRANSCRIPT AND LINKS AT https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-140-unsung-caretakers-unseen-land-mark-wendy-pratt-idaho-ranchers

Forage on semi-arid rangelands is finite but variable across space and over time. And grazing decisions start with balancing animal forage demand with forage supply, a significant challenge in vast and varied landscapes. In this episode, Matt Reeves, Sonia Hall, and Tip discuss StockSmart, the new free, online decision support tool just launched that accesses remotely sensed forage production data and allows the user to easily define what forage is accessible to their livestock based on fences, watering locations, the type of terrain their livestock will traverse and other parameters. Check out the future of grazing decision-making today at https://www.stock-smart.com/.

Transcript and links to resources mentioned in this episode at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-139-stocksmart-sustainable-grazing-starts-good-forage-production-data.

The Bruneau Owyhee Sage Grouse Habitat (BOSH) project is a collaborative partnership of state and federal agencies, wildlife advocacy groups, and private landowners to restore native upland landscapes in Southwest Idaho to a more natural condition benefitting sage grouse, songbirds, antelope, spotted frogs and other wildlife. Conifer encroachment is now recognized as the second most significant threat to sage grouse populations in the Western U.S., second only to invasive grasses like cheatgrass. The partnership has mobilized money and people to control juniper on more acres than have ever been treated in contiguous pieces. In this first episode based on the Idaho Life on the Range series, project partners discuss the genesis of the project, science behind sage grouse habitat enhancement, and possible future activities.

Guests in the this episode are:

Steve Stuebner, writer and producer of Life on the Range, a public education project sponsored by the Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission.

Connor White, project manager for Pheasants Forever, based in Boise.

Jeremy Maestas, National Sagebrush Ecosystem Specialist, USDA-NRCS Working Lands for Wildlife, out of Bend, Oregon.

Visit the BOSH Project episode page at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-138-bosh-project-restores-sagebrush-sea-grand-scale-maestas-white-stuebner to access the transcript of this interview, watch the documentary video, and read other reports of this effort.

Thank you for your patience as we shift funding sources and work into a slightly different approach to content. This brief piece describes these changes and previews upcoming episodes.

Dr. Nathan Sayre has written a delightful book on the origins and history of rangelands science, public ownership, agency management, and grazing philosophy in the United States. Join Tip and Nathan as they discuss his background building fence on ranches on the Southwest, his pathway to the sociology of rangelands, and then surprising findings in Sayre’s book research. Finally, they visit about recommendations for modern range management.

Transcript and links at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-136-politics-scale-history-rangeland-science-nathan-sayre-re-release

Our language both reveals and shapes our internal philosophy about all of the beings and things in the world. And it guides our behaviors and interactions with those things -- humans, animals, plants, and non-living things. Yet these below-the-hood inclinations are formed very informally, usually without conscious thought. This interview with Anna Clare follows from an article in Rangelands on whether we should consider cattle 'partners' rather than 'tools' and invites the listener to ponder this not-so-esoteric question.

Transcript and links are available at: https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-135-are-cows-tools-effects-language-anna-clare-monlezun

Maybe there is no silver bullet, no holy grail of grazing. But there are patterns of grazing impacts that work well for particular plant communities, and good grazing managers give attention to these effects and modify them over time to achieve landscape goals. Jim Howell is the founder of Grasslands, LLC, a ranch management company that directs grazing on over 320,000 acres of land around the world. Jim discusses lessons learned in observing and and manipulating grazing patterns in the varied ecology of places like Florida, Western Colorado, New Zealand, Montana.

Transcript and links at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-134-contextual-adaptive-grazing-management-patterns-jim-howell

"Decades of scientific research on grazing and soil organic carbon (SOC) has failed to form a cohesive understanding of how grazing management affects SOC stocks -- characterized by different formation and stabilization pathways—across different climatic contexts." This quote from the introduction to the review paper "Ruminating on soil carbon: Applying current understanding to inform grazing management" frames the dilemma we're discussing in this episode. How can common management levers that define overall grazing pattern, including timing, intensity, duration, and frequency, be used to optimize mechanistic pathways of SOC sequestration? These authors offer a framework for beginning to answer this important question.

The transcript for this episode and link to the paper are at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-133-ruminating-soil-carbon-paige-stanley-jim-howell-ariel-greenwood-chris-wilson.