Our capacity to sustainably manage the world's rangelands hinges not only upon our knowledge of ecological processes, but upon a greater understanding of the social processes and mental models that drive human decision-making. In the context of rangelands in the Western United States, most existing research on rancher decision-making has used mail surveys to identify demographic and socio-economic factors that influence management practices. Often these studies explain little of the variation in rancher behavior, and do not reveal how social and cultural factors that influence decisions. We used semi-structured interviews with 40 ranchers and grounded theory, a method of qualitative data analysis, to understand how these ranchers make management decisions at different spatial and temporal scales. The analysis illustrated rancher's complex working knowledge of rangeland systems. The mental models that emerge from this analysis are much more complex than those often implied by the existing literature on land manager decision-making, employing multiple ways of knowing about a wide range of factors in the social-ecological system.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.