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Meeting Summary

Thanks to all who attended the 2022 Rangelands Partnership annual meeting in-person and virtually! Focused on the theme of Community, 20 participants traveled to Grand Junction, CO and 13 participants joined virtually.  
 
The meeting opened with a keynote talk, Community and Knowledge Transfer: Empowering Future and learning from Past Generations of Land Stewards, presented by Sarah Wentzel-Fisher, Quivira Coalition Executive Director. In her presentation, Sarah shared the history of the Quivira Coalition and how two of their ongoing projects are engaging the community and focusing on knowledge exchange.
 
The lightning reports were a huge hit again this year. The meeting evaluation revealed many participants enjoyed hearing about Extension and library programming in other states and the potential to collaborate with colleagues. There was an update on the United Nations approval of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP). The group discussed public outreach opportunities leading up to IYRP in 2026. 
 
Meeting participants received an update on RangeDocs, a new online search tool that allows users to pinpoint information within technical documents, funded by USDA NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant and a RREA National Focus Funds grant. The tool is designed to search a catalog of rangeland resources and Extension documents at the paragraph level. The team has worked with rangeland professionals to annotate and tag common rangeland terms where they appear in a document, reducing the time a reader must search for the information they need. Users can create a profile to save search results and create personal collections by topic. There are also curated collections created by experts which suggest relevant resources on various topics. The team will be adding more documents and continue to develop curated collections throughout the year.
 
Last year the new WERA proposal was submitted and approved. This proposal will not need to be renewed until September 2026; however, the RP must complete a mid-term review and submit an annual report.
 
During the next year, the Marketing and Social Media action group plan to work on marketing the website. The Collections and Content action group brainstormed on ways to reach out to universities to collect dissertations and theses that would be relevant to Rangelands Gateway. The Membership and Sustainability group discussed how to increase membership of librarians and Extension agents from universities that are currently not active in the Partnership.
 
Jeanne Pfander (Arizona) was elected as Secretary, Ashley Hall (Arizona) will move to the Vice Chair position, and Nancy Marshall (South Dakota) will move to Chair. Livia Olsen and Walt Fick agreed to host the 2023 meeting in Manhattan, Kansas. Complete the survey to help Livia and Walt set meeting dates for April 2023. The 2024 meeting will be held in Hawaii, and Texas A&M graciously offered to host the 2025 meeting. The RP Roundups will continue to be hosted in 2022-2023 and online marketing training webinars will be hosted in fall 2022. Many thanks to local host Retta Bruegger and outgoing Chair Krista Ehlert on their hard work to make the meeting successful. Onto another productive year with the Rangelands Partnership.

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