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 →

By Sonia A. Hall

Our most recently published case study on resilience to climate change describes Brenda and Tony Richards’ family cow-calf operation in Murphy, Idaho.

Over the last few years at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources we have developed a range of case studies highlighting individual farmers and ranchers in the Pacific Northwest that are implementing practices or strategies that provide ecological and economic benefits now in addition to increasing resilience to climate change. We’ve discussed some of these case studies in previous AgClimate articles (see those on the use of stripper headers and precision nitrogen). Our most recent series is the Rancher-to-Rancher series, which explores innovative approaches three Pacific Northwest ranchers are using that increase their resilience in the face of a changing climate. Though each case study is specific to the conditions of the particular rancher being profiled, insights and strategies from each case study may be applicable elsewhere.

Check out the most recently published case study, that describes Brenda and Tony Richards’ family cow-calf operation in Murphy, Idaho. Continue reading →

Re-posted from Water Current News, WSU Extension

The Entiat Experimental Forest 40 years after a wildfire. Photo Marketa McGuire.

In 1970, when a large lightening caused wildfire started in the Entiat Experimental Forest in north-central Washington, researchers had already collected 12 years of baseline data on three watersheds. Weather and streamflow (including quantity, quality, and timing of water discharge) had all been recorded. This provided a unique opportunity to study the long-term effects of post-fire recovery efforts on hydrology.

Decades after the fire occurred, Ryan Niemeyer, an adjunct professor in Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, along with his colleagues Kevin Bladon and Rick Woodsmith, began examining the long-term impacts the fire had on the hydrologic system. His findings, recently published in the journal Hydrological Processes, reveal that fire can affect annual stream discharge, peak flows, low flows, and evapotranspiration even 40 years after the burn. Continue reading →

By Sonia A. Hall

A recent report describes how wildfire risk reduction projects can have rippling economic effects across a community. Photo: Gila National Forest under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Being involved in FireEarth, a large research project exploring what makes communities more or less vulnerable to the impacts of wildfire and its cascading consequences, I am really interested in the complexity of impacts and, just as important, what communities, agencies, and other organizations can do to reduce their vulnerabilities. It is not unusual for the initial hypothesis associated with these questions to be that wildfire risk reduction projects in the watershed upstream and around a community have costs associated with them, and we need to understand those costs—as well as the targeted risk reduction benefits that such projects provide—to make sound investment decisions. Now recent work published by the US Geological Survey and partners explores other advantages of such projects: Continue reading →