Get reliable science

Sustainable grazing management strategies for the western Great Plains have been developed for forage and livestock production. However, ongoing declines and range contractions of many grassland birds alongside a desire to enhance perennial, cool-season grasses for increased productivity and vegetation structural heterogeneity has challenged managers to consider broader management objectives. Prior research has not addressed livestock movement patterns at scales relevant to ranchers or landscape disturbance patterns pertinent to grassland birds. As a result, there is considerable uncertainty (and controversy) about how plant community dynamics, grassland bird habitat and livestock production can be optimally balanced. In 2012, we initiated an adaptive grazing management experiment in shortgrass steppe of Colorado where 10 stakeholders representing ranchers, government agencies, and conservation organizations were assembled to 1) choose and prioritize desired ecosystem services, 2) determine criteria and triggers for livestock movement among pastures in an adaptive manner to achieve desired services, and 3) select monitoring approaches to assess management success and inform adaptive strategies. Pastures managed by the stakeholder group are paired with pastures managed using traditional, season-long continuous grazing at the same stocking rate in a replicated experimental design. The first two years of stakeholder meetings demonstrated the importance of in-person meetings to discuss varying perspectives on the system's potential response to grazing management. Increasing the spatiotemporal variability in cattle grazing intensity emerged as a key goal of the adaptive management treatment, with objectives for grassland bird recovery set at community/landscape scales, and for recovery of desired perennial cool-season grasses at ecological site/pasture scales. Technological needs include improved methods for rapidly summarizing and visualizing monitoring data at the landscape scale. The effort has revealed constraints on management imposed by the experimental design, while also validating the critical importance of control treatments and effective communication of monitoring data for adaptive management.