Principal Investigators:
Dr. Susan Charnley, US Forest Service, PNW Research Station, Portland, OR, scharnley@fs.fed.us
Dr. Hannah Gosnell, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, gosnellh@geo.oregonstate.edu
Project Summary:
Ranching has historically been an important livelihood strategy in the Blue Mountains Ecoregion (including the Wallowa Mountains), and remains so today. Because federal lands comprise over half of the land base in the Blue Mountains Province, public lands grazing is integral to sustaining ranching in the region. Yet little information is available that characterizes ranching in the counties of the Blue Mountains; the role of public lands grazing in contributing to the ranching economy of the region and to working landscape conservation there; and range management on public and private lands. Moreover, ranching and public lands grazing are currently subject to a number of environmental stressors that ranchers and federal land managers must respond to, including fire, drought, and invasive plants, all exacerbated by climate change. The reintroduction of wolves and concerns about threatened and endangered fish species present additional challenges for grazing management.
This research project seeks to increase understanding of the impacts of these stressors on ranchers and the viability of their operations; the strategies they use to cope with and adapt to them; and barriers to coping and adaptation. The goal is to identify ways to help ranchers increase their adaptive capacity and to increase the resilience of ranching and public lands grazing in the Blue Mountains to help sustain rural communities and economies in the region. This project is being conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Starkey Experimental Forest and Range, who are simultaneously developing habitat suitability models for cattle that will help managers make ecologically-sound range management decisions and experiment with grazing systems that may facilitate active restoration of threatened and endangered fish habitat. Both of these research projects have the potential to provide a basis for innovative approaches to grazing management, but their utility will depend in part on ranchers’ perceptions of the value in adopting new ways of doing things. Our social science research on ranchers’ challenges and needs will thus complement the ecological research taking place at Starkey.
We will undertake research with federal grazing program managers, national forest grazing permittees, and other stakeholders on and around the Malheur, Wallowa-Whitman, and Umatilla National Forests to gather information about the following topics:
1 – The nature of public lands grazing (e.g., number and size of allotments, AUMs maintained, trends)
2 – The social, cultural, and economic contributions of ranching and public lands grazing to the lives and livelihoods of ranchers, and the role of ranching in working landscape conservation;
3 – Grazing management strategies on and off public lands, associated governance institutions, factors that influence management decisions, and innovative approaches to range and herd management;
4 – Perceptions of rangeland and water resource health, and how to improve conditions if needed;
5 – The social and environmental stressors that ranchers experience, how these stressors affect their operations, how ranchers adjust their management strategies in response, and constraints to doing so;
6 – Policies, programs, management strategies, and institutions that could increase resilience.
The desired outcome of this research is 1) to increase knowledge about public lands grazing and ranching in the Blue Mountains to help inform decision-making; and 2) to identify policies, management aproaches, and institutional arrangements that help promote adaptive range management and the socioecological resilience of ranching and public lands grazing in the Blue Mountains.
