Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Project/Activity Number: W1188 Resiliency of Sagebrush Communities and Rural Economies

1. Progress Report: Describe results since the project was last approved; compare actual accomplishments with the objectives in the project outline; reasons should be given if project objectives were not met. Rate the project on accomplishments of stated objectives.

Progress Report

ExcellentGoodFairUnacceptable

Comments:

Objectives of our W1188  project include 1) prioritize threats to sagebrush ecosystems and develop prioritization framework, 2) evaluate links between land management and health of rural communities in sagebrush biome, and 3)  engage local communities in research and outreach.

Our funding proposals discussed below addresses each of these objectives as priorities in accomplishing the stated research goals therein.  Specifically, our conceptual model helps us identify priority threats facing the sagebrush biome eventhough our initial proposal focuses on livestock grazing, future proposals will examine the roles of several threats simultaneously and identify those that are of greatest priority to a specific region.  Because our conceptual model is a coupling of socio-economic and ecological processes, it enables us to directly estimate the effects of conservation actions (i.e., managing for sage-grouse) on ecological processes, how those processes affect economics and community security.   Which in turn, will potentially drive new human interactions within the system to affect other changes in conservation or landuse.  Our proposal seeks to engage representative local communities in the surveying and interviewing of its citizens to enhance our understanding as to how conservation efforts are directly or indirectly affecting their economic and social well being.  Our goal is to provide outreach materials from this work to practioners and to land owners, and public land permittees.

Due to the pandemic, the team has not had the ability to meet in person since being approved by the MRC. Regardless, the team has made good progress and has been able to attract a diversity of participants from LGUs and state and federal agencies. As a new group, the team is still finding its footing and determining opportunities to leverage grant funds and determining how best to share collective research results with interested stakeholders and the public. Moving forward, the team will be working on the development of outreach materials that can provide research results and perspectives beyond peer reviewed journals and professional conferences.  Our interdisciplinary team spent 2-3 months developing a research proposal, SUSTAINING RURAL LIVELIHOODS, LIVESTOCK GRAZING, AND SAGE-GROUSE HABITAT IN WESTERN SAGEBRUSH SYSTEMS, for an integrated project under USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) call for proposals under Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Competitive Grants.  It was submitted on 17 June 2021 through University Nevada-Reno, under Dr. Perry Williams, as PI.

2. Linkages: Is there evidence of the interdependence among project participants and with other projects/agencies? Please list relevant examples. How well is the technical committee working together? Document any linkages. Is there evidence of delivering accomplishments to peer groups, stakeholders, clientele, and other multistate activities? Rate this project on linkages.

Linkages

ExcellentGoodFairUnacceptable

Comments

As mentioned above, our project includes, sociologists, economists, and ecologists to try to disentangle how conservation of endangered species affects, local communities, economies and other ecosystem services. This team has met via Zoom 5 times since February, and subgroups met 1-2 additional times prior to the AFRI proposal submission.  This team has been extremely successful in working across disciplines and in fact seeking avenues to integrate ecological, economic and sociological questions into a single framework for understanding how conservation of a single species may affect the economics and social structures of small rural communities.

3. Funding: Has outside funding been obtained from other federal and state agencies or the private sector by the technical committee to support project activities? Rate this project on its accomplishments in leveraging outside funding to help solve the problem being investigated.

Funding

ExcellentGoodFairUnacceptable

Comments

As mentioned above funding has been applied for thought AFRI’s Competitive Grants of Foundational and Applied Sciences.  In particular, our proposal sought funding under the “Sustainable Agroecosystems: health, functions, processes and management.” Here is the project summary from the proposal:  Natural landscapes commonly support rural economies through livestock grazing. Threats to these landscapes threaten rural socio-economic values. However, federal policy and management concerning natural resources also influence socio-economic values. Conserving natural resources and socio-economic values requires a new paradigm that explicitly models the relationship among social, economic, and ecological values as a complex system that dynamically interacts. We hypothesize that socio-economic, and ecological values are inextricably linked in natural landscapes. Specifically, that socio-economic values in rural communities are tied to ecological values of resistance (ability of a system to buffer against disturbance) and resilience (ability of a system to rebound after a disturbance; R&R). To examine this hypothesis, we propose to develop a cohesive framework to examine how range management affects range productivity, ecosystem health, and society across an R&R gradient. Given the unprecedented conservation effort of sagebrush obligate species, we focus on the sagebrush ecosystem of western North America. We will examine and measure connections among socio-economic and ecological outcomes of sage-grouse policy decisions. Our objectives are to 1) quantify economic tradeoffs, feedback loops, and threshold-effects of grazing strategies, and how those strategies affect sagebrush habitat, 2) assess the sociological R&R of rural communities to changes in grazing strategies, and 3) quantify how grazing affects sage-grouse populations. We will use historic and current data on ranch management, economics, and sage-grouse demography. We will collect new sociological data to understand socio-economic values of rural communities, and how those values co-vary with changes in ecology, economics, and policy and regulation.

We anticipate submitting a proposal to National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Integrated Social-Environmental Systems (DISES)  November 2021, using the NIFA proposal as a foundation.

4. Information and Technology Transfer: Document information and technology transfer which is required for every project supported by Multistate Research Funds. Rate this project on plans or accomplishments for delivering the results to users which include other researchers (journal articles, technical reports, etc.), Cooperative Extension, industry, producers, students, etc.

IT Transfer

ExcellentGoodFairUnacceptable

Comments:

We have not generated outputs or outcomes yet to transfer to the field or to agricultural producers in the region.  Once we receive funding for our proposals we will implement an extensive outreach campaign to inform practitioners, public land grazing permittees and private land owners of our findings and implications for rural communities.

Regional Committee or AA Recommendation:

Recommendation

--Select One--Approve/continue projectApprove/continue project with revision (provide specific reasons)Disapprove/terminate project