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Inspire Session

Session: : Rangelands in the Age of Megadroughts: Ecology, Livestock, and Landscapes

INS 2-6 - Learning from adaptive livestock management during severe drought

Monday, August 7, 2023
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM PDT
Location: 253
Forage production on the Colorado high plains exceeds 1,000 kg/ha in most years, but collapsed to ~360 kg/ha during the drought of 2022. Given such extreme inter-annual variation, livestock managers seek to utilize ‘grassbanking’, i.e. leaving some areas ungrazed in wet years to carry forage into drought years, to help mitigate the degree to which de-stocking is necessary. We use lessons learned from the drought of 2022 to identify grassbanking strategies that capitalize on landscape heterogeneity in soils and plant communities in order to most effectively extend grazing opportunities during drought, while also achieving desired outcomes for grassland wildlife habitat.