Much of the Western rangelands are a checkerboarded, interspersed land ownership of private, state and federal public lands. This creates difficulty in accomplishing landscape level vegetation management. One cultural tool that helps this diverse ownership with potentially conflicting opinions work together is Community-based Collaborative Conservation (Charnley, Sheridan and Nabhan 2014). These groups avert conflicts by focusing on evidence-based issues and group education (collaborative learning) in order to reach collective landscape level management decisions on shared goals regarding rangeland natural resources. Collaborative Conservation groups raise the voices of communities with concerns about impacts to their livelihoods because of environmental issues such as: landscape condition changes diminishing landscape productivity, erosion causing soil loss and water quantity and quality declines, endangered and threatened species management, wildfire mitigation and management, enforcement of regulations or fragmentation and development threats (Wilkins et al. 2020). Typically, these groups have a diverse representation of stakeholders from community members (producers, farmers and local residents) to industry and non-governmental organizations, universities as well as state and federal government agency representatives. Public land management agencies (e.g., U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) also have cooperation and collaborative partnership policy mandates for many of their land planning processes. This brings collective action to implement rangelands maintenance and restoration solutions to often complex, cross boundary and interrelated environmental issues. 

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