I spent over a week in Wyoming and Idaho this spring learning about the environmental issues and organizations working towards solutions. From meeting the housing advocacy group Shelter JH to Wyoming Game and Fish, I began to think about how lived experience influences why we work on the issues we care about and persist. This Read more about Learning About Place—Julia Chen[…]
Check our UHPSI’s newly released 2022 Annual Report! Read about student projects, impacts, and journeys from the past year.
Championing the ecological importance of cattle grazing doesn’t always land well in environmental groups. Pushback often quotes methane emissions, a warming climate, societal collapse and so on. Yet, across rural areas of the western United States, entire communities depend on cattle. Over one-third of the land area of the United States is rangeland, undeveloped land Read more about Making the Case for Cattle—Kathleen Voight[…]
In conjunction with The Nature Conservancy-Montana (TNC), Montana Conservation Corps (MCC), and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), our team is creating a protocol to evaluate the impacts of low-tech structures, sometimes referred to as beaver dam analogs, that have been installed in central Montana. This protocol will leverage GIS and remote sensing technologies, challenging our team Read more about Evaluating Mesic Restoration Efforts in Montana with Geospatial Tools[…]
Kathleen Voight is working with the Additive Conservation department of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust (CCALT) to determine funding priorities for their internally-managed Agricultural Resiliency Fund. CCALT holds easements over 700,000 acres of ranchland across Colorado, with the goal of conserving working landscapes for the benefit of future generations. The Agricultural Resiliency Fund will Read more about Funding Priorities for Improving Ecological Value and Agricultural Viability on Colorado Rangelands[…]
Industry, based on landscape, has been foundational to the American West’s cultural and ideological underpinnings since the beginning of colonization. While natural resource extraction industries (mining, logging, ranching, agriculture) spurred westward expansion and continues to be a significant industry in the West, a new industry is of increasing importance, outdoor recreation. Both the extraction and Read more about Why study outdoor recreation in the American West?—Mara MacDonell[…]
There’s a bull bison rolling on the ground. Hooves point skyward as the bull’s body moves—rocking, kicking, sliding on a carefully chosen patch of earth. Dust hangs in the hot summer air. Other bison look on at the commotion, then return to grazing. A calf imitates the bull, playfully rolling under mom’s legs. What are Read more about Can Bison Shape the Prairie?—Ross Martin[…]
As a kid growing up in Florida, we were warned that the hottest part of the day was between noon and 2 pm. My mother insisted that we come inside during these hours to avoid the heat and what she considered to be the riskiest time for sunburns. Yet, at 4:30 pm today in this Read more about A Note from the Steppe—Rachel Renne[…]
Bison are a uniquely important species in North America’s past, present, and future. They are a keystone species that maintains and enhances ecological function in grassland ecosystems. Bison long supported Indigenous cultures, and their slaughter enabled the United States’ bloody conquest of the continent. The disappearance of the large herds disrupted human, plant, and wildlife Read more about Bison Restoration: Pursuing Environmental Justice on the Great Plains—Ross Martin[…]
CLICK HERE TO VIEW LANI’S STORYMAP Rural gentrification is increasingly recognized as a significant problem for Western amenity towns in the U.S. as a result of rapid in-migration fueled by the desire for closer access to these amenities, expanded telework from the pandemic, and broader nation-wide socioeconomic trends. Corresponding social, economic, and political impacts include Read more about Mapping Rural Gentrification—Lani Chang[…]
During an especially hot and dry summer in Pinedale, Wyoming it’s hard not to reflect on the looming predictions of increasing temperatures and precipitation variability. The two combining to create high-temperature drought conditions, which are becoming more common across the planet. Growing up on the east coast in suburban Virginia, a drought did not mean Read more about Drought in the West: The Consequences of Variable Forage Production for Open-Range Livestock Operations—Scott Carpenter[…]
If you visit cattle ranches in most of the U.S., you’ll see two kinds of cattle grazing methods: the first is where cattle graze freely on the land, the second is rotational grazing. But on a ranch in May, Idaho, there is a third method, called “inherding.” With the inherding method, cattle are herded on Read more about Inherding: The Concept, The Benefits, and its Feasibility—Cally Guasti[…]
As I write this, surrounded by towering Douglas firs in the Pacific Northwest, I am very far removed from the open prairies of Central Montana, but for the past few months, my mind has often been wandering through the expansive Northern Great Plains. My student partner, Lani, and I have been working with the Range Read more about Who is leading the effort to conserve privately-owned grasslands in the West?—Laura González Mantecón[…]
“We’ve all chosen to do ranching the hard way” a rancher chuckles through the small illuminated rectangle on my computer’s desktop. My project partner, Laura González Mantecón, in the adjacent rectangle on Zoom asks him what he means by that. They’ve all chosen in one form or another to adopt practices that demand a lot Read more about Ranching the Hard Way—Lani Chang[…]
Two students from the Yale School of the Environment’s Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative teamed up with The Nature Conservancy in Wyoming to deepen the culture of conservation in these iconic grasslands. With over 13.2 million acres, the grasslands of Thunder Basin, Wyoming are part of a patchwork of federal, state, and private land that Read more about Exploring New Approaches to Grassland Conservation in Wyoming—Katie Pofahl and Humna Sharif[…]