Emily Jane Davis, Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist, Oregon State University Extension, & Sonia A. Hall, Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, Washington State University

Annual invasive grasses like cheatgrass, here appearing with a typical reddish tint, increase fuel loads and favor bigger fires, especially as the climate changes. Photo: Darrell Kilgore.

Wildfires in rangeland systems across the western United States, including the intermountain Northwest, are not going away. If anything, research and climate change modeling suggest that wildfire activity will continue to increase (Abatzoglou and Kolden 2011), and conditions support expansion of the annual invasive grasses, like cheatgrass, that increase fuel loads and favor bigger fires (Bradley et al. 2016). Yet wildfires are already an issue in these rangelands systems, for ranchers, natural resource managers, and conservationists worried about species like Greater sage grouse. So, tools that are helping make a difference now can become the path forward for addressing these issues in the future as well.

Wildfire impacts cross ownership boundaries, and ranchers are often closest to fires when they start. In the sagebrush steppe landscapes of eastern Oregon and Idaho, growing numbers of ranchers participate in Rangeland Fire Protection Associations (RFPAs) to help minimize these impacts. Continue reading →

By James Ekins, Ph.D., University of Idaho Extension

IDAH2O citizen scientists learning how to collect good stream data. Participants return home with a more sophisticated understanding of stream processes and are better prepared to explain stream health to neighbors and elected representatives, contributing to community learning. Photo: James Ekins.

Understanding and managing natural resources and agricultural processes are complex tasks, especially in a rapidly changing world. Community resilience has been described as the “existence, development, and engagement of community resources by community members to thrive in an environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability and surprise (Magis 2010).” One important ingredient for achieving community resilience is community learning, the idea that groups of people build and share norms, values, beliefs, and understandings of the world around them. Overall, the better a community communicates, the greater its ability to develop values and norms that lead to adaptive capacity (the ability of people to engage in activities that influence resilience). Different ways of knowing enable different capacities; communities assemble knowledge from multiple sources, along with local (place-based) cultural adaptations, to adapt to change.

As an Extension educator, I wonder how social learning increases a community’s capacity to react and adapt to socio-ecological change. Are we as non-formal educators making a difference? Are our communities more resilient with long term educational processes like multistakeholder collaborative groups, field tours, and public education workshops? How do they result in a community that is better connected, with a broader base of knowledge and common understanding to draw from? Continue reading →