Grazing Management Tool

Science-based grazing management is crucial to preserving and improving rangeland productivity and sagebrush ecosystem health. By adjusting the timing, duration, frequency, and intensity of grazing, managers can contribute to ecosystem services such as fuel reduction and invasive annual grass control. They can also utilize rotational grazing to minimize or mitigate impacts on sensitive species, such as greater sage-grouse. However, practitioners of outcome-based grazing often do not have access to the suite of data needed to inform effective grazing management. We developed the grazing management tool (GMT), which is a decision support tool that operationalizes the science around grazing to guide planning and adaptive management in Nevada. The GMT provides managers with access to information that can help plan where, when, and how intensely to graze within a pasture or allotment, to support their operation while protecting or improving ecological resilience. The tool centralizes several spatial datasets integral to grazing planning and management, including vegetation cover, biomass, water features, wildfires, ecological monitoring, sensitive wildlife habitat, and ecological resilience. Within the tool, users can query and interact with the data to address objectives at the pasture or allotment level, such as: where annual invasives or perennial grasses are dominant, where biomass is available to cattle, how water or fences can be used to change availability, what areas are suited for targeted or prescribed grazing, and what areas would benefit from rotational grazing to avoid wildlife conflicts. The tool can be used as a map viewer, allowing users to visualize pasture and allotment conditions. The GMT also summarizes data and allows the user to view trends in different attributes through time, such as in invasive annual grass cover. The tool aims to provide an interactive and easy-to-use framework, to support common goals for all stakeholder groups working toward productive and resilient rangelands. Information is preliminary and provided for best timely science.