I attended this webinar co-hosted by the Western Rangeland Data Initiative and Working Lands Conservation (WLC), titled “Rangeland Monitoring: How Do We Produce Trusted, Actionable Data?” The goal of the project was, how do we take collected monitoring data from being something passive into something we can use to make decisions that can alter and improve the land?
Kris Hulvey, lead scientist at WLC made some excellent points on how we can take data and turn it into something useful. She always starts with these questions, why am I doing the monitoring in the first place? What questions am I trying to answer? How do we collect actionable data that leads to informed changes in management? It is crucial that we include possible management options in the design of the monitoring protocols, it is not just data for data-sake.
James Rogers, owner of Northway Ranch Services, touched on the key element that is often forgotten in the scientific approach, the people. He stressed the importance of including all the partners, including cowboys, and even neighbors, so that you can really get a wide breadth of knowledge. He mentioned the value of having producers be involved in the monitoring process, in order to build those relationships, but also to produce data that can be trusted and understood by all parties. Monitoring should be done so that it can be empowering for ranchers, and it can be fun.
Melissa Dickard of the BLM also joined the conversation to provide a valuable public agency perspective. From their perspective monitoring really needs to meet scientific qualifications, such as being repeatable and standardized. If it is not, it is really hard to have it be transparent to the public. It is a lot easier to manage what you can measure. If we want increased flexibility of grazing on public lands, we need to have data to prove the benefits. These things need to be documented, and this will require more accountability of the permittees.
The main take away from this is really the importance of looking at not only the ecological landscape, but the social landscape. The social landscape provides truly trustworthy data. It is crucial to understanding the people who are actually managing these working lands. What are their values around stewardship? What outcomes do they want? Answering those questions first is vital to understanding what possible management changes can be made, and if the people and land have the ability to make them.
A recording of the event is available to view here (Passcode: !1jk?Bb7).