[Srm] Fw: Rangelands Partnership Newsletter -- December 2018

Fri Dec 21 07:32:11 MST 2018

________________________________
From: Rangelands Partnership <adalke at email.arizona.edu>
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2018 4:59 AM
To: Mcclaran, Mitchel P - (mcclaran)
Subject: Rangelands Partnership Newsletter -- December 2018

Rangelands Partnership Newsletter December 20, 2018
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Newsletter Topics

Save the Date - RP Annual Meeting
The Wyoming Restoration Challenge
SRM Annual Meeting
Leopold Conservation Award
Open Education Resources
The Art of the Range Podcast
Intermountain Regional Herbarium Network
International Report

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Save the Date!
2019 RP Annual Meeting
May 19-22, 2019
Fargo, ND
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Brief, Tentative Schedule

  *   Sunday, May 19 – Welcome Reception
  *   Monday, May 20 – Meetings @ NDSU
  *   Tuesday, May 21 – Meetings @ NDSU
  *   Wednesday, May 22 – Optional Tour (tbd)

Travel Planning Notes

  *   A group rate of $94 (plus taxes/fees) will be available at the Candlewood Suites<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=651bf14a48&e=7001fb7a12> starting one month before the meeting. More details will be provided before then.
  *   Book early if you plan to arrive on Saturday, as it will be busy in town with the Fargo Marathon happening on the 18th (Saturday).
  *   The Hector International Airport in Fargo is about 1 mile from the meeting hotel (and they do provide a shuttle). For another option, some travelers like to fly into/out of the Minneapolis airport and drive the remaining distance.

Hope to see you there!

The Wyoming Restoration Challenge: Creatively Cheating Cheatgrass on Western Rangelands
By David Kruger
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One of the worst invasive species in Western rangelands is cheatgrass, a plant also known as Bromus tectorum or “downy brome.”  The problems of fighting cheatgrass are certainly nothing new to rangelands stakeholders, as its negative impact has been recognized since the early twentieth century.  Although cheatgrass can still be consumed as a forage plant, it greatly reduces production of other grass perennials, inflicting both economic and ecological losses of vegetation diversity and productivity.
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Cheatgrass infestations were almost considered beyond control as early as the 1940s, until range and plant scientists increasingly explored a variety of approaches for effectively controlling them.  However, the University of Wyoming creatively took these myriad explorations a step further, by actually inviting various stakeholders to apply their own solutions for the cheatgrass problem in a field laboratory at the James C. Hageman Sustainable Agriculture and Research Center (SAREC), an Experiment Station farm near Lingle, Wyoming.

Known as the Wyoming Restoration Challenge, this collaborative experiment functioned as a friendly competition over a two year period, with thirteen teams from Wyoming and Nebraska applying their own unique methods across individual ¼ acre plots, all of them infested with cheatgrass.  The competing teams came about through open invitation, and included university and community college faculty, county weed and pest agents, extension agents, local ranchers, and various students from the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels.

The various methods chosen by each team were equally diverse, with integrated (and legal) approaches not only incorporating different herbicidal treatments, but high-intensity grazing, mowing, burning, tillage, cover cropping, bacterial weed suppression, and alternative species seeding.    After one year, cheatgrass cover had been reduced on every team plot, with outcomes ranging from 20% cheatgrass reductions to as high as 96% reductions, with some plots concurrently increasing desirable perennial grasses by as much as 4000%.  At the end of the second year, attendees at the annual SAREC Field Day were able to visit the various plots and vote for a winning team.

However, the spirit of the Wyoming Restoration Challenge was not to determine winners and losers, but to generate public awareness of various approaches for effectively combatting a common invasive weed, and to share beneficial information not only among the competing teams themselves, but land managers with a vested interest in restoring cheatgrass-dominated pastures.  Although the Wyoming Restoration Challenge officially concluded in the fall of 2017, a number of videos, interviews, and photos involving the contest and its participants are now available via Facebook.

Learn more about the Wyoming Restoration Challenge.<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=1dbcf5632e&e=7001fb7a12>

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2019 Society for Range Management Annual Meeting
Gateway to the Prairie
Minneapolis, Minnesota
February 10-14, 2019
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Registration <https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=c3319e328c&e=7001fb7a12> is live. Early bird discount is available until December 29th. The Rangelands Partnership will have a booth and participate in the Outreach, Communication, and Website Committee meeting on Sunday, February 10th from 1-4pm.

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Leopold Conservation Award
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Sand County Foundation honored Jim O’Rourke and his family with the Leopold Conservation Award. The O’Rourkes have implemented a variety of conservation practices to their Nebraska land that has been in their family since 1950. These practices include: seeding with perennial grasses to stabilize and rebuild soil health, improving grazing practices in riparian areas, thinning ponderosa pine stands, and improving diversity of trees and shrubs.  The O’Rourkes have also explored multiple ways for smaller-acreage ranches to diversify their income streams, such as beekeeping, pasture raised poultry, a horse motel, renting land for hunting, and offering overnight stays in historic sheep herder wagons. Watch the video to learn more<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=2b7ae4c3ad&e=7001fb7a12>.

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Open Education Resources
By Carolyn Jackson
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It is ironic that with all the opportunities to share information openly and instantly on the internet, education is still out of reach to many of the world’s population. Students in the U.S. are being hit from two sides as tuition and books costs soar. According to a GAO Report<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=55bd586dcb&e=7001fb7a12>, from 2002 to 2012 new textbook prices increased by 82%, while tuition and fees increased by 89%, while the overall consumer prices grew by a mere 28%.

With the price of academic library materials increasing by approximately 10% annually, the U.S. academic publishing has come under intense fire lately. Despite the fact that research is produced at public institutions and primarily funded by public dollars and written, edited, reviewed, and shared by researchers, the results are hidden behind paywalls, protected fiercely by copyright, and are thus inaccessible to those without significant technological and financial resources (SPARC,<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=a517914ac8&e=7001fb7a12> n.d.). Traditional research communication methods are fundamentally at odds with the mission of the land-grant college to not only conduct research but to share research results beyond the university walls. Adopting Open Educational Resources (OERs) is one way in which we as educators and librarians can make higher education more affordable for students and increase their success rate while making a larger global impact globally with freely available high-quality information.

What are OERs?
 UNESCO defines OER<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=5ef4c1acb2&e=7001fb7a12>s as “Educational resources that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees.” OER’s are excellent resources for outreach beyond the university. Agriculture specialists and extension agents will be able to access freely available educational materials and pull out and customize the information they need.

How are OERs being used in the classroom?
Survey courses –  Broad general first and second year courses, such as introductory biology or sociology, are taught at every school. These classes are the low hanging fruit of OERs, with huge cost savings across institutions with broad impact. Consequently, a number of excellent textbooks are available for these subjects.

Mid-level core courses - Introductory curriculum courses such as introduction to Soil Science or Range Management - subjects least likely to adopt and OER. They have often adopted the definitive text for that topic, which has been used for decades. There aren’t many OERs available for these courses and little incentive for OER creation – lower enrollment numbers, and good text availability.

Advanced courses – Instruction on a highly specialized topic and are often only offered once per year or every second year. With small enrollment numbers, there aren’t huge cost savings. Instead of adopting a textbook (there may not even be one), instructors often use journal articles or book chapters. It’s not uncommon for instructors to be building what is in essence a textbook for the class. This situation is a perfect opportunity to approach a professor about creating an OER textbook.

Incentives for creating OERs? Many publishing options exist for OERs, from uploaded to an institutional repository to peer-reviewed publishing platforms, such as OpenStax<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=b0622cf601&e=7001fb7a12>, with impact measured through metrics from global usage. Many academic libraries have funds available to help support OER creation.

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The Art of Range Podcasts
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The Art of Range podcast provides education through conversation with some of the brightest minds in rangeland management. A new episode will be released every two weeks. Learn more about the project here<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=12f77e31cc&e=7001fb7a12>.

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Intermountain Regional Herbarium Network<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=12f663130c&e=7001fb7a12>
By Amy Shannon
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Looking for range plant identification and teaching materials?

Part of SEINet – Regional Networks of North American Herbaria, the Network includes digitized herbaria and plant lists from throughout the Great Basin states, but can also search across additional networks that include the rest of the U.S., the Pacific, Canada and Mexico. In addition to large herbaria, contributors of specimen data include many small offices, such as the Caliente Field Office or the Swaner Preserve and EcoCenter.  Around 250,000 images of digitized specimens are available, with many more indexed without images.

You can search the specimen database by taxon or common name, location, altitude, latitude and longitude area, collector, or vegetation type.

Instead of searching, users can go directly to the image library and browse by family, genus or species.  In addition to specimen images, species overviews<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=66c090a445&e=7001fb7a12> are provided and linked to the interactive map.  Or you can choose a spot on the map, add a radius, and (optionally) a taxonomic filter, and it will build you an interactive plant list.  From within plant lists, an interactive key will allow you to zero in on the species by choosing characteristics of habitat, growing habit, and anatomy.

A large number of specific regional floras are available, including Range Plant Identification<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=aadc06031a&e=7001fb7a12> from The Society for Range Management, which includes the 199 plants that the SRM requires students to learn.

A number of herbaria have contributed teaching checklists with interactive keys and flash card quizzes.  Check out the Western Rangeland Plant Identification List<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=8e6db71489&e=7001fb7a12> contributed by Mindy Pratt and test your knowledge with the flash cards<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=3635c30cdb&e=7001fb7a12>.

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International Report
December 2018
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Rangelands Initiative–Global Meets in Rome. Generous support from ILRI gave me the exciting opportunity to represent the RP at an in-person meeting of the members of the Rangelands Initiative-Global (RI-G) partners. The meeting was hosted at FAO headquarters on 19-20 November and attended by members from diverse international and civil society organizations. Welcomes were given by Gregorio Velasco Gil coordinator of the FAO-Pastoralist Knowledge Hub and Fiona Flintan coordinator of the RI-G component (ILRI – International Land Coalition); with presentations following that updated the status of the Rangelands Initiative Asia, Africa, and Global components. Participants “mapped” who is doing what in relation to key thematic areas and identified opportunities for coordinated RI-G activities in 2019 including engagement with other organizations, representation at events, and development of position papers with strategic messages.  The themes are: 1) land tenure & governance in rangelands; (2) rangeland restoration; and (3) mobility; although cross-cutting issues of data/knowledge management, mapping, documentation, and indicators were also discussed.  Other next steps included identifying partners to form sub-groups to work on each area, including cross-cutting issues, as well as fund-raising opportunities.  Members of the RP have also provided feedback on the new RI-G website as final touches are being made before it is launched in January.  Stay tuned for further details!  If you would like to receive a copy of the complete meeting report, please contact Barb Hutchinson.

IYRP Fact Finding Meetings in Rome. The RI-G partners also support the effort to gain an IYRP.  Side meetings were held in Rome with FAO officials as well as organizers of the Decade of Family Farming (recently adopted by the UN for 2019-2028) to gain insights into the process for achieving a successful resolution.  This new information is being shared with the IYRP Support Group (formerly Steering Committee) reconstituted to support the Government of Mongolia’s proposal for an IYRP presented at the October Committee of Agriculture (COAG) meeting at FAO. The COAG subsequently put the issue for formal review/approval at their next meeting in October 2020.  We are pleased the IYRP is now formally in the UN process!  Look for further updates in upcoming issues of the RP Newsletter.

SRM Provides Funding to Support IYRP! On December 4th, SRM President Barry Irving provided the excellent news that the Board approved $5,000 to promote the IYRP designation.  This will give important additional support for a key IYRP Side Event planned for the fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-4) to be held 11-15 March 2019 in Nairobi, Kenya.  At the same time, SRM leadership has been meeting with USDA and State Department officials to keep the IYRP on their radars.  A huge thank you to SRM!

Publication:  Crossing boundaries: legal and policy arrangements for cross-border pastoralism<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=4410d7d54b&e=7001fb7a12>.  A joint FAO/IUCN publication on transboundary pastoralism reviews legal and policy arrangements that show how countries across the world facilitate pastoral movements between countries. It stresses the role of mobility as a strategy that allows pastoralists to make optimal use of scarce but valuable grazing and water resources over extensive areas of the drylands. The book aims to inspire and inform action by governments and civil society actors.

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Pamphlet: Transforming the Livestock Sector Through the Sustainable Development Goals<https://globalrangelands.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1e07e5b3765520a0c1bbf6590&id=32c5594988&e=7001fb7a12> (FAO)

Want to share a new resource, upcoming event, highlight a person, or anything else Partnership related?  Send a brief statement and picture to Amber Dalke<mailto:adalke at email.arizona.edu?subject=Newsletter%20Contribution&body=Please%20provide%20Partnership%20related%20content%20for%20the%20newsletter>.

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The Rangelands Partnership is a worldwide, multidisciplinary collaboration that provides resources needed to inform public debate and decision-making regarding today's grand challenges of food security, climate adaptation, public health, environmental impacts, and economic development as they relate to rangelands around the world.

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