Hailey Wilmer

• Fellow at USDA-ARS US Sheep Experiment Station

Social conflict over rangeland-use priorities, especially near protected areas, has long pitted environmental and biodiversity conservation interests against livestock livelihoods. Social–ecological conflict limits management adaptation and creativity while reinforcing social and disciplinary divisions. It can also reduce rancher access to land and...

This article outlines a middle-range theory of pastoralist/rancher identity, offering a framework for analyzing the meanings, symbols, and practices associated with four interrelated dimensions of pastoralist identity: identification with livestock, place, family and community, and occupation. Poetic analysis of interviews from pastoral systems in...

Semiarid rangelands throughout the western Great Plains support livestock production and many other ecosystem services. The degree to which adaptive multi‐paddock (AMP) grazing management approaches can help achieve desired ecosystem services remains unclear. At the Central Plains Experimental Range in northeastern Colorado, a management‐science pa...

United States federal lands are managed for multiple conservation, social, and commercial goals shaped by the visions of diverse interest groups. The rural economic and food-security needs of local public-lands-based communities have important implications for sustainable natural-resource management but can be obscured by national-scale public comm...

We outline practical considerations for grazing land adaptations with a changing climate, with an emphasis on the ranch operation scale and specific attention to directional climate changes and increased climate variability. These adaptive strategies fall into two themes: flexibility and learning under uncertainty. Ranches and livestock operations...

We outline practical considerations for grazing land adaptations with a changing climate, with an emphasis on the ranch operation scale and specific attention to directional climate changes and increased climate variability. These adaptive strategies fall into two themes: flexibility and learning under uncertainty. Ranches and livestock operations...

Resilience is becoming the dominant discourse in research and policy on climate change as well as wider social-ecological change. Resources and assets alone are often not enough to support resilience, especially in the context of multi-scalar change. Human agency, that is the ability to act and make choices that produce desirable outcomes, is criti...

On the Ground •Social science rangelands research has advanced substantively in the last few decades as a multidisciplinary endeavor, and notably through increased capacity to integrate with ecologically centered approaches. •The diversity of social science-related contributions to rangelands research continues to expand with both breadth and dept...

On the Ground •The King Ranch in Wyoming, established in 1911, has for generations been “Ranching on the Edge” and adapting to new challenges as they operate on the perimeter of Wyoming's largest city, Cheyenne. •Lessons learned from King Ranch are highlighted regarding decision-making approaches, management strategies, and partnerships used to ma...

On the Ground •The combination of stocking rate and marketing date that maximizes average net return per head will not necessarily maximize average net return per hectare. •The combination of stocking rate and marketing date that maximizes average net return per hectare often comes with risk-related tradeoffs, such as a higher risk and magnitude o...

On the Ground •The Long-Term Agroecosystem Research Network launched the LTAR Agricultural Performance Indicator Framework to evaluate how agricultural innovations perform relative to sustainable intensification goals in five domains: Environment, Productivity, Economic, Human Condition, and Social. •Here we describe our progress and plans for mea...

Natural resource researchers have long recognized the value of working closely with the managers and communities who depend on, steward, and impact ecosystems. These partnerships take various forms, including co-production and transdisciplinary research approaches, which integrate multiple knowledges in the design and implementation of research obj...

Frequent, severe defoliation reduces grass production and can alter plant species composition in grasslands. Multipaddock rotational grazing has been proposed as a grazing strategy that may reduce the frequency and intensity of defoliation on palatable grass plants without altering stocking rates. Previous studies evaluated this hypothesis using sm...

Drought is an inescapable reality in many regions, including much of the western United States. With climate change, droughts are predicted to intensify and occur more frequently, making the imperative for drought management even greater. Many diverse actors – including private landowners, business owners, scientists, non-governmental organizations...

The ongoing devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought new urgency to questions surrounding the origins, management, and complex dynamics of infectious diseases. In this mini review, we use growing international concern over the pandemic potential of emerging infectious diseases as motivation for outlining a research approach to study the emo...

On the Ground •The 2020 SRM Annual Meeting piloted “Campfire Conversation,” round-table discussions styled after the World Café approach. •The event attracted 280 attendees and enabled multidirectional knowledge exchange (i.e., “cuss and discuss”), rather than one-way “chalk-and-talk.” Attendees participated in three 20-minute facilitated round-ta...

On the Ground •Adaptive management should explicitly involve stakeholders, emphasize multiple iterations of identifying and prioritizing outcomes, and tightly link science-informed monitoring to decision-making benchmarks for effective feedback loops. •Short-term monitoring procedures should be simple, quick, and based on consistent methods that a...

On the Ground •As “co-produced” research becomes more popular, there is a need to evaluate the processes and outcomes of successful cases. •The Collaborative Adaptive Rangeland Management project is a case of a ranch-scale, 10-year grazing experiment ongoing in Colorado. We used social science to evaluate group learning. •We describe the complex,...

Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) is hypothesized to benefit management of rangeland ecosystems, but the presumed benefits have seldom been quantified, and never in a multipaddock rotational grazing system. Here, we evaluated average daily weight gain (ADG) of livestock (kg steer⁻¹ d⁻¹) in four grazing management treatments during the summers...

Pastoralists and researchers (and others) are finding new ways of working together worldwide, attempting to sustain pastoral livelihoods and rangelands in the face of rapid and profound changes driven by globalization, growing consumption, land-use change, and climate change. They are doing this partly because of a greater need to address increasin...

This article offers the Extension community a pathway to drought resilience and climate-related conversations through knowledge exchange workshops. In 2017, a "flash drought" affected eastern Montana, and ranchers in the region faced numerous challenges. Moreover, drought-favorable climate conditions are predicted to increase for the region. We hel...

Ranchers and pastoralists worldwide manage and depend upon resources from rangelands (which support indigenous vegetation with the potential for grazing) across Earth’s terrestrial surface. In the Great Plains of North America rangeland ecology has increasingly recognized the importance of managing rangeland vegetation heterogeneity to address cons...

Questions What are the rate, reversibility, and degree of symmetry in plant species compositional change in response to the addition and removal of cattle grazing in the shortgrass steppe? Specifically, how does the imposition and removal of grazing affect the abundance of perennial C4 shortgrasses and C3 midgrasses that are of primary importance f...

A comprehensive understanding of multipaddock, rotational grazing management on rangelands has been slow to develop, and the contribution of adaptive management (Briske et al. 2011) and sufficient scale (Teague and Barnes 2017) have been identified as key omissions. We designed an experiment to compare responses of vegetation and cattle in an adapt...

Throughout the Great Plains, aboveground annual net primary productivity (ANPP) is a critical ecosystem service supporting billions of dollars of commerce and countless stakeholders. Managers and producers struggle with high interannual change in ANPP, which often varies 40% between years due to fluctuating precipitation and drought. To quantify AN...

Drylands cover 41% of the Earth's terrestrial surface, play a critical role in global ecosystem function, and are home to over two billion people. Like other biomes, drylands face increasing pressure from global change, but many of these ecosystems are close to tipping points, which, if crossed, can lead to abrupt transitions and persistent degrade...

Grazing land models can assess the provisioning and trade-offs among ecosystem services attributable to grazing management strategies. We reviewed 12 grazing land models used for evaluating forage and animal (meat and milk) production, soil C sequestration, greenhouse gas emission, and nitrogen leaching, under both current and projected climate con...

Rangeland scientists have made substantial progress in understanding ecological dynamics of rangelands, but the social factors have received less attention in North America. A body of North American rangeland social science has developed over the past 4 decades, with the number of studies increasing each decade. However, these works have not been s...

Dairy farms producing 98% of the US milk supply participate in the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) Animal Care Program. Producers who sell milk to cooperatives or processors participating in FARM must follow program standards. The objectives of this study were to assess producer perceptions about the knowledge, experience, and value...

On the Ground • We assessed diet quality and livestock weight gains for shortgrass steppe pastures dominated by Loamy Plains or Sandy Plains ecological sites. • When growing season precipitation is “normal,” livestock gains are higher on Sandy Plains ecological sites, and diet quality is not limiting livestock production. • Conversely, when growin...

Learning is recognized as central to collaborative adaptive management (CAM), yet few longitudinal studies examine how learning occurs in CAM or apply the science of learning to interpret this process. We present an analysis of decision-making processes within the collaborative adaptive rangeland management (CARM) experiment, in which 11 stakeholde...

Access to the Internet continues to grow in rural areas, ensuring ranchers will have increasing opportunities to use the Web to find information about management practices that may provide them ecological and financial benefits. Although past studies have examined the role of the Internet in informing daily decision making by agricultural producers...

In the North American Great Plains, multigenerational ranches and grassland biodiversity are threatened by dynamic and uncertain climatic, economic, and land use processes. Working apart, agricultural and conservation communities face doubtful prospects of reaching their individual goals of sustainability. Rangeland research could serve a convening...

Complex and “wicked” natural resource issues often require transdisciplinary research approaches–methods that span boundaries among disciplines and engage multiple sectors of society in the research process. Social-ecological systems approaches acknowledge the complexity of dynamics within and feedbacks between natural and social systems, but have...

science has made substantial progress on understanding ecological dynamics of rangeland systems and the management practices that sustain them, and these findings have been systematically reviewed and synthesized in various venues (e.g. Briske 2009). As natural resource science has evolved to consider social-ecological systems (Charnley et al., 201...

The Northern Great Plains (NGP) region of the USA—which comprises Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska—is a largely rural area that provides numerous ecosystem services, including livestock products, cultural services, and conservation of biological diversity. The region contains 25% of the Nation’s beef cattle and a...

Rangelands of the western Great Plains of North America are complex social-ecological systems where management objectives for livestock production, grassland bird conservation, and vegetation structure and composition converge. The Collaborative Adaptive Rangeland Management (CARM) experiment is a 10-year collaborative adaptive management (CAM) pro...

On the Ground • Rangeland monitoring is an important component of rangeland management. • The Nebraska Grazing Lands Coalition developed a rangeland monitoring program (RMP) in 2009 to assist livestock producers in monitoring rangelands on their ranches. • Determining rangeland condition and fulfilling a requirement for conservation incentive prog...

Experiments investigating grazing systems have often excluded ranch-scale decision making, which has limited our understanding of the processes and consequences of adaptive management. We conducted interviews and vegetation monitoring on 17 ranches in eastern Colorado and eastern Wyoming to investigate rancher decision-making processes and the asso...

Rangeland researchers are increasingly interested in understanding working rangelands as integrated social–ecological systems and in investigating the contexts of human decision-making processes that support system resilience. U.S. public lands ranchers are key partners in rangeland conservation, but the role of women in building system resilience...

This synthesis article joins the authors of the special issue “Gender perspectives in resilience, vulnerability and adaptation to global environmental change” in a common reflective dialogue about the main contributions of their papers. In sum, here we reflect on links between gender and feminist approaches to research in adaptation and resilience...

On the Ground • Ranchers'’ responses to drought differ depending on where they live and specific circumstances of their ranches, but there are striking similarities across regions. • Changes in practice after a drought reflect a general desire to buffer one's operation against disruptions, rather than being specifically aimed at the next drought....

The gendered contexts of rangeland decision-making in the southwestern United States are poorly understood. We conducted life-history interviews with 19 ranching women and analyzed the resulting transcripts using narrative analysis. Interviews revealed eight common themes in these women ranchers’ experiences: 1) learning from older generations, 2)...

In this study, we examine the subjective decision-making experiences of cattle ranchers in the western United States. Using a constructivist grounded-theory framework, we analyse semi-structured interviews with 38 ranchers (in three states) whose operations rely upon native rangeland forage. We compare ranchers' drought management and succession pl...

On the Ground The field of rangeland science and management is working to incorporate women's voices and a better understanding of women's decision-making roles into our research priorities and Extension practices. The Wyoming Women in Range program offers a success story of Extension programming designed to encourage women's participation and enga...