Integrating Climate Considerations into Grazing Management Programs in National Parks Completed

The National Park Service (NPS) is responsible for managing livestock grazing in 94 units, and several park grazing management planning efforts are currently underway. However, there is a recognized need to update grazing management practices to address potential future effects of management practices and climate change. The goal of this project is to outline the steps required for developing NPS grazing management plans, to identify information needs and availability for these planning processes, and to initiate a scenario-based pilot project for meeting these needs at a given park unit. This will serve as an important step toward developing a transferable process to help parks ensure that grazing management practices are responsive and adaptive to future climate change.
 
In the first phase of the project, the team will engage resource managers from three NPS units in western Colorado: Dinosaur National Monument (DINO), Curecanti National Recreation Area (CURE), and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park (BLCA). Working with resource managers and subject-matter experts, the team will articulate and describe the planning processes and available information with regard to NPS grazing management. The team will then convene researchers, managers, subject-matter experts, and climate change adaptation specialists at a participatory climate change scenario planning workshop to develop a small set (3-5) of challenging, plausible, relevant, and divergent future scenarios that qualitatively assess how grazing resources and management at DINO may be affected under climate change. Concurrently, the process will identify common key characteristics that may be regionally applicable to BLCA and CURE, and will consider caveats for broader use at parks managing grazing in other regional biomes. Workshop participants will provide input on the project and process, identify quantitative information needs, and offer recommendations for streamlining the effort into a scalable, transferable approach that could be used to guide other park units seeking to update their own grazing management plans. 
 
A potential second phase of this project would entail the development of a modeling approach to provide quantitative information to NPS units that allow livestock grazing. This task would leverage recent advances in our ability to model grazing activities to evaluate the effects of climate change and management actions on vegetation within a specific park unit. Management actions that could be evaluated include stocking rates, prescribed fire, and invasive plant management practices.