“Rangeland Wildlife Ecology and Conservation” is the new go-to resource for rangeland professionals, practitioners, and students. Three of the chapters were coauthored by WLFW researchers and staff.
The science of rangeland conservation is changing. Just two decades ago, researchers knew little about how conifer trees or grazing impacted sage grouse and other sagebrush obligates. Restoring valuable mesic resources required expensive heavy machinery making it difficult to scale up these efforts to entire watersheds. Invasive annual grasses like cheatgrass, ventenata, and Medusahead gobbled up valuable sagebrush and grassland habitat even as ranchers and practitioners eradicated patches from pastures and fields.
In the Great Plains, ranchers and conservation professionals ignored expanding eastern redcedar trees or spent valuable time and resources cutting out the thickest infestations only to feel like their efforts produced little return as more trees grew in their place. Fire was an enemy of ranchers, not an efficient tool for conservation.
Private working lands, now widely regarded as a critical part of the conservation landscape, were often left out of the few large-scale rangeland conservation efforts that did exist.
Today, new technologies, new conservation approaches, and new ways of coproducing science have changed how rangelands are managed. Working Lands for Wildlife (WLFW) has been at the forefront of this shift. From the outset, WLFW has been grounded in practical science that has improved the collective understanding of the largest threats facing the West’s grass and shrublands and the proactive conservation solutions that best address them.
This shift is captured in a new textbook that will help train the next generation of rangeland managers called, “Rangeland Wildlife Ecology and Conservation.” With more than 100 coauthors and 30 chapters covering an extensive set of rangeland subjects, the book is the new go-to resource for rangeland professionals, practitioners, and students. Critically, the book fuses the ecology of rangelands with wildlife conservation, and it explicitly recognizes the critical importance that private, working lands play in rangeland conservation.
The book is freely available for anyone to download thanks, in part, to WLFW’s financial contributions. And it’s not surprising that WLFW invested in making a digital version of this book free. Paywalls don’t move ecosystem management forward, which is why we make nearly all the science our affiliated researchers and agency colleagues produce available to researchers, practitioners, landowners, and others through purchase of open access and direct sharing.
But perhaps more importantly, WLFW staff and science advisors are coauthors of three of the book’s chapters, highlighting their commitment to rangeland management and to producing solutions-focused science that moves management forward. That science is often conducted on the private lands where we work, and requires the support and buy-in of landowners.
It’s no small thing to have ranchers welcome a team of university or government researchers onto their land. Their trust and willingness to participate has helped us gain a much better understanding of these systems and has helped solidify our solutions-based approach and the win-win conservation strategies it produces – strategies that have immense value to their operations and way of life.
From our pioneering investment in the development of the Rangeland Analysis Platform to innovative partnerships and products that are helping train thousands of rangeland practitioners across the West, we’ve helped shift rangeland conservation from reactive to proactive.
Put simply, the coproduction and open sharing of science is ingrained in Working Lands for Wildlife’s DNA. Of course, as this book reflects, many other groups and individuals have also contributed to this new era of rangeland management. We’re grateful for everyone’s contributions, and we’re excited about this new future for rangeland conservation.
RANGELAND WILDLIFE ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION
Chapters co-authored by WLFW-affiliated researchers and staff:
Book Editors: Lance B. McNew, David K. Dahlgren, Jeffrey L. Beck
About this Book: This open access book reviews the importance of ecological functioning within rangelands considering the complex inter-relationships of production agriculture, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and wildlife habitat.
This book provides compendium of recent data and synthesis from more than 100 experts in wildlife and rangeland ecology in Western North America. It provides a current and in-depth synthesis of knowledge related to wildlife ecology in rangeland ecosystems, and the tools used to manage them, to serve current and future wildlife biologists and rangeland managers in the working landscapes of the West. The book also identifies information gaps and serves as a jumping-off point for future research of wildlife in rangeland ecosystems. While the content focuses on wildlife ecology and management in rangelands of Western North America, the material has important implications for rangeland ecosystems worldwide.
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: September 2023
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34037-6