AoR 139: StockSmart - Sustainable Grazing Starts with Good Forage Production Data

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>> Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.

 

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Welcome back to the Art of Range. My guests today are Matt Reeves and Sonia Hall, and the three of us actually have been working together on a grazing decision support tool that we've ended up calling StockSmart. Some people may have heard of this, although we have not done a lot of outreach on it yet, but we wanted to run this episode as an introduction to StockSmart for those that have not heard of it, just to explain what the features are, why it might be useful, and provide some information on where you can learn more about how to use StockSmart in the future. Matt has been on the podcast before. And of course, Matt is the creator of the Rangeland Production Monitoring Service data, which we have talked about. And Sonia Hall is with WSU's Center for Sustaining Ag and Natural Resources, and has been part of this project from the start as well. Sonia, why don't you introduce yourself and your role with WSU? And then we'll come back to Matt.

 

>> Thanks, Tip. I'm really happy to be on Art of Range. My name is Sonia Hall. As Tip said, I'm with the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. My focus there is really engagement and outreach, and I work on a variety of different projects on a variety of different topics, but I do have a background in arid lands ecology, and a real place in my heart for these systems, so it's been really great to work on StockSmart. And I'm looking forward to this conversation.

 

>> Thank you. Yeah, you've hit the big time now on the Art of Range. Matt, why don't you give a thumbnail sketch of what you do for the Forest Service in general? And then we might just have a brief overview of the Rangeland Production Monitoring Service.

 

>> Yep. Well, thank you, Tip, and hello, everyone. I work at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana, and I focus exclusively on rangeland issues, looking primarily at modeling and remote sensing types of projects focused usually on rangeland fuels or grazing applications.

 

>> Yeah, thank you. We, I think, ended up working together on a couple of things before we came around to this one, but -- maybe I'll just give a quick overview of what my interests were in putting together this grazing decision support tool. And then I'm interested in -- because I don't remember now exactly, Matt, how you got into it, but I was finding myself in numerous -- was trying to respond to several requests, I'd say over the last 10 years, where an organization or a rancher or an agency is needing to design a grazing plan in a large landscape that did not previously have a grazing plan, you know? So where there's a long history of grazing the same geographic footprint, you know, the -- what some people have called the stock and monitor approach can work relatively well. Meaning that if, you know, if for 50 years we've had 300 cows grazing from May to October on this landscape and the landscape's still healthy, then we can keep doing that. I still think there might be some problems with that, but in general, that can work. But if you have a new -- a new area of -- that is potentially going to be grazed, you know, the million-dollar question, the classic textbook stocking rate question is, how many animals for how long and why? And that came up in a number of different situations where, you know, a conservation district needs to manage a conservation easement or a rancher acquired a new piece of property or put together multiple properties and now we need a grazing plan on that. Or somebody's applying for the BLM's off-range horse and burrow program and needs to figure out how many wild or feral horses could a particular piece of ground carry for a period of time. And a topic for a different day might be whether or not the idea of stocking capacity or carrying capacity is even a valid concept. But I can't get away from the idea that there are still some limits there, in that an example I've given before when we've talked about StockSmart is that if you've got one acre of land, it doesn't matter how aggressively you manage it, it's not going to support 10,000 mother cows year-round. It sounds ridiculous, but it gets the -- it gets to the idea of this extreme end of the spectrum. But then, you know, conversely, if, say we've got 10,000 acres of rangeland, even if it's not very productive rangeland, it would likely support more than one mother cow for a year. And somewhere in the middle of those extreme values is a range of stocking values that represents something that would be sustainable. And what's sustainable might be different in a different year. But those two things together get at what I think are the key features of StockSmart. So the idea behind this decision support tool was -- was to -- to use remote sensed values for forage production that incorporate the spatial variability as well as the temporal variability. Because in a lot of these -- in a lot of these landscapes, the spot that you're standing on might have 1,000 pounds to the acre, but you go 100 yards the other direction and it might be 100 pounds of forage to the acre, and everything in between in a really complex mosaic across the landscape. So the problem that people have run into and that I have run into is that if you -- if you attempt to do some kind of a, you know, onsite sampling protocol, a clipping exercise where we're trying to directly measure on-the-ground forage production, we might get a statistically reliable estimate for the place that we sampled. But we have so many different plant community types, different soil types, even the same -- even the same vegetation type but on a different soil type might have different levels of variability from year to year. And the second, we try to extrapolate that to 40,000 acres, something is lost in that scale transition. So -- I'll shut up here in a minute. So the idea behind StockSmart was for a person to be able to identify an area of land and multiple areas of land because we might -- you know, we typically are trying to make grazing plans based on, you know, pasture-level polygons or areas, not an entire forest service allotment. We need that data at the pasture level and -- and have access to the amount of variability that there has been in a particular location over time. And then I'll have the user supply what the herd variables are. And then we can begin to get at something like a more accurate stocking plan, because most of the Western US is pretty variable and variable in space and time. And I think we've gotten fairly close. We did quite a bit of pre-build interviewing with people that would likely be end users of StockSmart. And we'll have Sonia talk about that in just a minute. But Matt, I wanted to come back to you. You've -- what are some of the other applications that you have used the Rangeland Production Monitoring Service data in?

 

>> Well, the primary uses of these data are to do primarily what you said in the beginning. You know, eight, 10 years ago, we didn't have these data. And so they started in about 2017. And the reason that we started that project was we were fielding a lot of questions by range managers in the Forest Service and the BLM asking questions about not only stocking rate, but also fuel loads and other types of questions for which we just didn't have any data for. So I figured instead of just doing one-offs here and there, we'd develop a system that enables us to look at the production each year using satellites. So we've got a record from '84 -- 1984 to 2023 and soon to be 2024. So we get a long time series. And with that, we're able to test assumptions that were previously made in certain allotments and look at the change over time of that productivity to determine if our old rules of thumb will still be appropriate. A lot -- as you know, a lot of our grazing and allotment management plans in the Forest Service and I suppose in the BLM are out of date in some cases, and we need to revisit those periodically, and having these remotely sent data makes that easy to do.

 

>> Yeah. For those of us that are not -- not more intimately involved in what some of these processes are to revise grazing plans, can you describe a bit what's required when -- like, how often would a federal grazing plan be re-evaluated or should be?

 

>> Well, the stock and monitor is typically used as you know, but just as I'll give you one brief example, in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, there are some allotments that were set with stocking rates, say in the 60s, where there was a lot of transitional range available. And over time, you know, because of the tree encroachment and the trees coming back through some natural succession, the forage underneath those trees has been gradually reduced. And so people want to revisit the permits in those cases and ask the question, "Is the number of livestock that we have proposed here still valid over time, given these changes?" And that actually requires quite a bit of effort. There's a lot of, of course, paperwork involved and policy to make changes to those permits, but it's one that is continually -- continually looked at across the United States. But one other thing I would say is we also use this process looking at forest plan revisions. For example, in the Rio Grande National Forest, there was a forest plan revision, a requirement in a forest plan that we needed 531 million pounds of forage for various types of herbivory. And so using this production monitor, you can test that and ask the question, "Is that still valid? Are we seeing that kind of production across the region?" So those are the types of uses and steps we would take to evaluate herbivory on federal lands using these remotely sensed products.

 

>> Yeah. Thank you. And Sonia, you've been involved with a few different decision support tools and have been involved with quite a few collaborative efforts to manage arid lands. What are your thoughts on -- on whether or not there's anything else that's similar to StockSmart in terms of guiding grazing management?

 

>> As far as I know, there isn't another decision support tool similar to StockSmart, at least not in what is freely and openly available to anyone. And what we tried to do, as you know, Tip, and as you've already mentioned, is first of all explore, "Is this kind of tool really useful?" Because we started from, "Hey, we think there's a gap here. We think there's a need for a tool that can really help anyone that's doing rangeland management take advantage of the forage production data that Matt was just describing." You know, those data are available, but to be able to use them for your specific purposes and for your rangeland management, especially the sort of longer-term planning, that's the beauty of StockSmart and what we saw a gap and a need for, but we were just a few voices here. And so we kicked off this process doing a series of listening sessions around the Pacific Northwest to really get a sense from state and federal and tribal rangeland managers and ranchers and ranching association representatives to really get a sense for, you know, "Is it just us that see the need here or is there really a need?" And what we heard there was that there is a need and -- -- and there's an even broader need than what StockSmart can produce, because as you alluded to, Tip, there's a lot of other grazing management decisions that could be informed with these large data sets that help us see both the variation across our rangelands and also the variation from year to year. And even the variation, in some cases, the data is getting good enough to look at variation within the year. And so there's still a greater need out there. We focused on this sort of first key decision of the stocking rate. And so I think between those -- what we heard in those initial listening sessions, that's what gave us the impetus of, "Yes, there is a need for this kind of tool. Let's find a way to get it done." And that's the step that we took with another round of reaching out to rangeland managers and ranchers and having a more detailed discussion of, "Okay, what does the tool need to do? What kind of functionality, what kind of things should the tool be able to allow you as a user to do for it to be useful?" And so that's what's really guided the design of StockSmart and continues to guide it, because we are continuing to improve the tool. So I think it's -- in my mind, it's -- conceptually, it's a fairly simple tool, but the power it gives in terms of providing access to these large datasets that get updated annually and that give us information back 40 years on forage production and how it's varied across space and from year to year is really powerful.

 

>> Yeah. I mentioned that one of my interests in this was just trying to do my own job in responding to, you know, a variety of entities and individuals that are trying to produce a grazing plan and there's some limiting factors there. Maybe to get down to brass tacks here, two of the things that I think are really key features that we were aiming for are, first, about as close as we can get to actual, you know, pixel-level forage production on large landscapes. Instead of assuming that soil type 835 has 125 pounds of the acre and we just multiply that, you know, this is -- and of course, the Web Soil Survey data is assuming that whatever you're looking at is in some kind of a reference state, and that may or may not be the case. And so, you know, Matt's RPMS data is looking at what's actually there at a 30-by-30-meter pixel on the ground and then adding that up inside of, you know, whatever size of a grazing area we've got. So we're trying to get at actual forage production for particular places on the landscape. The second big feature is that we're allowing the user to define some animal terrain use variables that provide at least, you know, some amount of prediction as to what forage is actually accessible to grazing animals, you know? So if we've got a pasture that's 10 miles wide and there's only stock water on one side of it, there's not much grazing use occurring on the far side of that 10-mile-wide pasture. And if we include all of that forage as part of the stocking rate calculation, we're very likely to have significant overgrazing on, you know, more than half of the area because that's all that's getting used. And so -- but, of course, you know, there are a hundred variables in where animals go, when and why, but there's still some big ones, you know? Distance to water and slope are significant limiting factors in where particularly cattle will move on the landscape. And so StockSmart allows the user to say, "Well, my cows will travel 4 miles to water" or "I've got 1700-pound simmental cows that have never had to walk uphill in their life and they won't go more than about a mile from water." Or, you know, I've also seen smaller framed animals that will use really steep hillsides and you'll see them all over a very steep hillside, especially if there's grass there. But then there are other animals that don't just want to not go far from water. They also won't climb a hill, and they'll starve out on a flat before they'll climb a hill and go look for water. But the -- the manager is the one that knows those differences or distinctions about a given herd. And so you can -- you plug that in and then it constrains available forage based on where animals are likely to go. And I think this gets back to one of the main motivating factors here. There are a hundred different grazing calculators out there, but almost every single one of them assumes that the user knows what forage production is and is prepared to make assumptions about, at least in this part of the world, very, very large areas. And those assumptions are maybe not very accurate. And of course, in the stocking rate calculation, the amount of error can get very large if you've got four or five different factors in the calculation that are all off in the same direction. We can be off by an order of magnitude. And so this is an attempt to get at actual forage production, including how much variability there is over time, and to try to predict where animals are likely to go on the landscape in order to access, instead of just assuming that we're going to reduce the total by 20% because we're just guessing that 20% of the area is not grazeable. And of course, I think probably the next -- the next iteration of some of these things is once we have enough animals out there that have actual distribution data being collected by, you know, programs like Virtual Fence software and systems, then we can plug in actual distribution and be even closer on those predictions. But one of the other big features that -- that we heard loud and clear from end-user interviews is that most of these other really useful decision support tools that give you access to some of this landscape-scale data don't allow you to save a project and then come back to it. So for example, if I'm working on a grazing plan and need to access Web Soil Survey data, the only way to get that is to rerun the analysis in the Web Soil Survey every time you want to run a different report. But StockSmart allows the user to save a project under your login, in fact, multiple projects, and then work on them over time, and share it with somebody else that might be able to help. So like if, say I'm a permittee on a national forest allotment, but I know that my range con [phonetic] has GPS to all of the water locations. I can give that range con access to the project and they can -- they can input that water layer and then we can work on it together and allow some cross-communication. Matt, I'm curious, we -- I think we published StockSmart back in September and so we're not even a year out now from when this became publicly available. Are you aware of people within the Forest Service that are currently using StockSmart to make grazing decisions?

 

>> Yeah, there are a lot of people investigating the use of it. One of the biggest limits we've found in being successful in some of the Forest Service allotments is what to do about the below-canopy forage situation. So as in the case of the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, we really had no idea what was in the understory. So to -- in using StockSmart, one of my requests with our collaborators was, "Well, let's do a brief summer campaign and get some ground observations that we can fit a curb to with -- that compares the overstory conditions with understory productivity and plug that into StockSmart." So that's been one of the common themes, I would say, about the uses that I've encountered with people, is the limits with the understory, because as you know, the Forest Service owns a lot of forest land, and so that's one of the things we are beginning to focus on, is how to deal with that.

 

>> I'll jump in. I think that the other aspect, even as we work with our partners to try and improve some of these elements like, Matt, what you were just describing and those inputs of, you know, really better understanding forage production under a forest canopy, which, of course, is harder for remote sensing datasets to actually capture. And I do want to give a shout-out to our partners at the University of Arizona who are the ones that actually did the development -- the technical development of the tool itself. One of the functionalities that StockSmart currently has that doesn't resolve these limitations but can help explore that space of uncertainty is that as a user, you can develop scenarios. So for example, with -- there are a couple of parameters that the user can adjust to try and get at that factor that Matt just described of how much forest production is there under the canopy. And it doesn't have the answer but it allows the user to -- to create a scenario where you say, "Okay, if this set of parameters better describes the amount of forage I have under my forest canopy in these allotments, then what does that mean for stocking rate?" And it allows you to do multiple scenarios. So you can -- as a user, you can explore in those areas where there is uncertainty, where we're not sure of do we have the right answer built into the tool, you can at least explore, "Okay, what would happen if I say that under the canopy, there is this amount of forage or this other amount of forage?" How much of a difference does it make when it gets calculated for the however many thousands of acres of a particular allotment where the forest canopy itself is variable? So there might be areas within that allotment that don't have much forest canopy and we're doing a good job at estimating forage production and then there might be areas that are somewhere in between, and then areas that have a really thick forest canopy where the remote sensing data really can't see what's happening in the understory. So there are -- there is some ability to explore that space, which I think is really useful and is driven by our interest in developing a decision support tool that allows the user to use this information to make their own decisions rather than a tool that is meant to give you, "Oh, here's your stocking rate and that's what you need to stick to." That's not the intent of StockSmart.

 

>> Yeah. And I think we've sometimes used the term "a starting stocking rate," and I don't want to communicate in this discussion that stocking rate is everything. My main point in the introduction was that I do think it still matters and that it is possible, even if you're applying really aggressive grazing management, to still be overstocked, you know? And so there's this -- I think it's an unavoidable question that there is some limit and we can push the limits with grazing management. I wanted to come back, too, to Matt's comment about the limitations. Correct me if I'm wrong here, Matt, but as I understand it, the places where the RPMS data is less useful is where you have either forest canopy or a lot of grass canopy. Meaning that, you know, say once you get above 3000 pounds to the acre in a grassland, the -- any additional increase in forage volume is related to the height of the plant structure, the height of the -- of the canopy, and it's difficult to see that with a satellite. And you sort of have the same problem in a forest. Once the forest canopy is above whatever threshold, it's difficult for a satellite to see, so to speak, how much grass is underneath that canopy. But we have a pretty large percentage of the American West, and right now, StockSmart is limited to the west -- the 10 Western states. There's an awful lot of area in there where it does work really well and we've done quite a bit of beta testing in areas where we're familiar with the landscape and the forage production and historical stocking, and can compare historical stocking with what results are coming out of StockSmart for that specific grazing area. But Matt, did you have any more comments about the limitations of the satellite-derived annual forage product?

 

>> Not really. I think the 3,200-pound mark is about right, and as you said, you know, according to what I've seen, 75% of the United States -- or 75% of our rangelands are producing less than that value. So I still feel pretty confident about use of the production monitor in something like StockSmart.

 

>> Got it. And I did want to respond too, Sonia, to your comment about the University of Arizona. We will likely have Matt King on a subsequent episode to describe some of the calculations that are going on underneath the hood. But this was really the first time that I had been involved with developing something like this where there's a significant amount of web coding going on, and I have to say that it was pretty impressive. Like, we would describe something that we think we'd like to accomplish with the system and then they just make it happen. And it looks a little bit like black magic, but I was -- I was blown away by what kind of stuff can be accomplished by somebody fiddling with web coding in the background.

 

>> And someone who really has an eye for design of these tools, Kim Daly, was also -- is also part of the team at the University of Arizona. And her ability to envision how it could or should look like in a user interface from our description of what we wanted to achieve was really mind-blowing, at least for me, because I, as well, I've been involved in the development of tools, but it's mostly been around the content and the what is it -- the information that needs to be shown, what is the -- how do you present that information -- what information do you -- how do you synthesize that information so it's useful, but less so the actual interface, which is a whole other skill set in and of itself.

 

>> Yes. That's a great point that just because a program can do something, doesn't mean that people can make it do something. And I had also not given much thought to that prior. I say I hadn't, I've used some programs maybe -- true confessions here, I tried some time ago to use an older version of Nutrient Balancer to run rations for livestock. And unless you've got a degree in how to use the program, it can be a little bit difficult to make it run. I think Kim and Matt together have done an amazing job of making this something that somebody can encounter without having been trained in how to use the program and intuit how to get to what they need to do, which is not a small accomplishment. It's quite impressive and the three of us on the call can't take a whole lot of credit for that.

 

>> I think the other aspect to call out, as well, in terms of -- -- sort of how we went about trying to inform that design is as we were getting -- as Matt and Kim had a sort of working version of StockSmart, we did, again, convene a few hardy folks who were willing to spend a little bit of time playing with the tool and getting familiar with it. And so we got a lot of useful feedback from that beta testing that we asked them to do, which really helped -- really helped fine-tune some of the details on the interface, but also confirmed that point that you were making, Tip, of it is a fairly intuitive tool that with a bit of a, you know, getting a step up in terms of just the basics of how to work with StockSmart, it's not that hard to then become sort of a power user, of really taking advantage of all the functionality that's available.

 

>> Yes. And I think it'd be worthwhile to point out a couple of features. I realized that we're attempting to describe a web application in an audio-only interface. And so I would encourage people to go play with this. And we've got at least one tutorial that's out there now. And I'll mention here, but we'll mention it again that we'll be rolling out a webinar series this fall that will walk people through, you know, a more extensive set of training sessions on how to use StockSmart and all the different functionality. But one of the things that we heard multiple times from people is that it would be really useful to be able to do scenario comparisons, either with -- like for infrastructure testing. If, for example, we want to put in a new water tank on the far side of a big pasture, you know, how much difference does that make in terms of additional forage that would be available to grazing animals compared to not having that water there? So you can -- you can create different scenarios inside of StockSmart to run different kinds of calculations. And there's a hundred different things that could be compared. You know, changes in pasture divisions, pasture divisions plus water, using a different class of livestock, maybe that will use slopes differently. There's lots of different things that could be -- that could be compared. And that has been, I think, one of the more useful and distinctive features of this program.

 

>> Another feature that helps in some of those scenarios and thinking about what scenarios you even want to explore as a user is it has the ability to visualize the effect of the distance to water and the effect of slope. So this is a very simple visualization of it, but if you're looking at a -- at the map of your allotment or your set of pastures, as they're called within StockSmart, your grazing units, you can turn on a layer that just color codes from sort of highest to lowest, from forage available to no forage available -- the landscape based on distance to water, for example. And so visually, it's very easy to see and to explore, "Oh, are there certain areas that, you know, most folks who are on the ground probably have thought -- have the knowledge to know, you know, 'what areas are my cattle probably not grazing because they don't have access to water.'" But generally, where is the line, you know? How much are they grazing and to what extent? This helps just give a very simple visualization of it. And similarly, with the effect of slope, once the user puts into -- into the tool your understanding of what slopes your animals are likely to graze or not, then you can take a look at this, again, a very simple visualization that gives you a sense for, "Oh, does this really capture what I know of where my animals are grazing or not? Or should I tweak this parameter? Or should I build a different scenario to get a sense for what would happen if I miss -- if I don't yet know what that -- what the herd that I'm managing actually does and how they behave in relation to the slopes?"

 

>> Yes. In my own experimentation with using Stocks-1 [phonetic] on projects that I'm currently working on, that has been one of the key features that I find myself using all the time. Just as an aside here, I realized that we have not made any mention of what the website is. And of course, at this point, people are not often typing in an actual URL. They're running some version of a web search. We used to call it a Google search, but it seems that maybe Google doesn't have the total monopoly on the search market anymore. Anyway, I did run an actual Google search just a minute ago to see whether or not StockSmart -- our StockSmart would come up. And at least in my search, it comes up as the second listing when you just run a search for StockSmart with no spaces. But the URL is stock-smart.com and that'll get you directly there. But it appears that you can also search for it and you'll probably get there as well. Let's see. I mentioned that we'd be doing some training in the fall. It's probably worth mentioning here that the initial creation of StockSmart was funded by USDA NIFA monies. We had a relatively small grant that ran for a couple of years and we -- we were able to get as far as creating a functional software or network program using that funding. We now have a subsequent grant from the Western SARE program, Western Sustainable Ag Research and Extension. And that is what is funding some -- a little bit of additional programming, but primarily outreach. And so I mentioned that we'll be doing a webinar series in the fall. We will have a -- we will have a link in the show notes to the information about that webinar series as well as a link directly to StockSmart. And if you get to the StockSmart webpage once we have training scheduled, we'll have a link to that in there as well. I want to mention, also, just a few comments about data privacy. The world of public lands grazing has been controversial, sometimes legally controversial in places in the last 30 years. And people have legitimate concerns about data privacy. And so I want to mention here that if you build a project in StockSmart that's on federal or state land, nobody else has access to that information unless you share it. And, you know, most of these public land boundaries are publicly accessible so -- you know, for example, if I've got a forest allotment, anybody could look up the forest allotment boundaries and run their own calculations on it. Nevertheless, you know, the point is whatever you build inside of your account in StockSmart is not accessible to anybody else, including, as we've discovered, the programmers who, you know, also can't break into that even if they needed to to try to help you. So if you -- you know, the only people that have access to your StockSmart projects are people that you share it with, and that also, we heard, was an important feature in building this program.

 

>> We, as you said, Tip, we are continuing to work on improving StockSmart and providing additional functionality, And yes, of course, all of that is funding and capacity dependent, but the more we hear about features or functionality that would be really useful to have as part of this tool, the more we can go pursue the funding to be able to do it. So -- both from the perspective of we are hoping to support everyone who's looking to use the tool, so there's features on the tool itself to get in contact with us if you run into problems and so please use those. We are paying attention to those. Matt King is very responsive in helping work through any issues that come up, so that's available to everyone right now. And then please do reach out if you have ideas for partnering and working together on applications of the tool. We're always interested in hearing -- you know, if you are comparing the calculations that come from StockSmart to your historical data in your -- in your specific operation or situation, we're really interested in hearing how that goes and what you're finding. All of this is useful input as we continue to work on StockSmart and -- because our ultimate goal, as Tip, you said right at the get-go, is to provide a tool that's useful and helps those who are looking to establish or sort of continue to maintain sustainable grazing operations, that they have tools that allow them to do some of these calculations easily, that allow them to access these remotely sensed data that otherwise, even though they're freely available, may not be easy to access and plug into these calculations in a straightforward way. And so that's -- we continue to work towards that and to improving the tool to be able to do that for a wide array of rangeland managers.

 

>> Yes, that's a really good point. We do have a feature inside of the StockSmart web interface where if you're needing help or run into a problem, you can request help inside of the program, but we also have contact information for everybody who's on the development team on the website, both emails and phone numbers, and people are welcome to contact us directly. I would also mention that I found a number of projects where somebody else was running into a problem. You know, they could share their project with me or with Matt King, with University of Arizona, or with Matt Reeves, and then we can -- we can see the project directly and work on it with you. And, you know, that's part of what we're doing right now to try to make this work better and help people work through solutions. And just to reinforce again, the idea behind this is not that this is the solution or the final answer, but it's providing enough information, accurate -- more accurate data than what people have had access to previously to inform a grazing management plan, which incorporates, clearly, more things than just a stocking rate.

 

>> And to do that in an easy to use fashion.

 

>> Yes, for sure. And to that point, you know, if there are additional features or I guess interface suggestions that would make it easier or places where people feel like there are not enough information or they keep hitting the same barrier where you're trying to make something happen and can't, let us know and we can plug that into the various features that are in line to get worked on, you know, as we have time and funding to do that.

 

>> Tip, one additional aspect that I wanted to call out that we haven't really touched on much here is that the calculations that StockSmart does for stocking rate is based on about 40 years of remote sensing data. And so it provides a range of AUMs, a range of animal unit month estimates for a particular location. And I think that that's really important because as anyone who's managing these systems knows, they are very variable year to year in terms of the production. And so if you have a very wet year or a very dry year, that can make a significant difference to the amount of forage available. And so being able to look at what's the range that a particular pixel, a particular grazing unit has shown in terms of forage production over that time frame is really useful information, as you say, in just having more to look at to help understand and make decisions on stocking rates for the long term.

 

>> Yes. I think that's -- I think that's critical. We fairly recently did a re-release of an episode with Nathan Sayre about his book, Politics of Scale: A History of Rangeland Science. And I think I mentioned in that interview that one of my main takeaways from the book was that we in the range profession have really underestimated the extent to which variability from year to year in the timing and amount of precipitation is really one of the biggest drivers in landscape change. And we have not really accommodated that level of variability with grazing plans. Either making grazing plans or understanding plant community response to grazing that might have been, you know, in a given location, a static stocking rate could be undergrazing or overgrazing depending on the year. And there's places where that variability is quite high, you know? We're talking 100% or greater differences, sometimes, from year to year, not 10 or 20% difference from year to year, like, might be more common in, you know, a wetter environment. Yeah, so the range of values that are provided in StockSmart are there deliberately to illustrate not even the full range of variability, but a statistical range of variability for a given -- a given grazing area on the landscape. The current grant to do outreach on StockSmart focuses on providing training to federal, state, and tribal land management agency people. And then -- and then we'll do some additional outreach from there that's more focused on individual ranchers and conservation districts. But this first phase is really focused on larger landscapes that are publicly or tribally owned. And this will be a series of five webinars in the fall where the participants will be understanding how StockSmart works, what it's intended for, what some of the limitations are in terms of plant community types, and how the calculations work and how to use StockSmart to plug into longer-term grazing planning, particularly in the agency context. And then users will be able to work through their own projects with, you know, with those of us that have been involved in building StockSmart and, you know, think through how to make that work in their context. Was there anything you wanted to add to that, Sonya, about the content of the webinars?

 

>> I think just highlighting that last point, Tip, that yes, we will be -- will be sharing a lot of information about the tool and what's under the hood and what's the rationale for how it was developed and what's under the hood. But also, it's an opportunity to develop your own project for your own whatever set of grazing units that you are interested in and do that in parallel so that there's a constant discussion and back and forth on that and support as needed as everyone develops their own -- their own project.

 

>> Yeah. I think that's right. I'm resisting here, you know, diving more into some of the details of the underlying data and how the calculations work. But I think we'll save that for an upcoming episode with Matt King, for sure, and probably Matt Reeves, just to describe -- you know, people want to know what's under the hood. Of course, you know, if you're building a grazing planning project on a large area, the million-dollar question is, is the data that we're relying on any good? And I would reference, we have a couple of older episodes with Matt Reeves about the rangeland production monitoring service data, and you can look that up. But we will have more discussion on that in this next episode, describing how the calculations work and, you know, the details of how the data is produced and made available inside of StockSmart. So we really hope that you will give StockSmart a test drive, and we'd like to know how it works out for you. So feel free to reach out to Sonia or Matt, or I through the StockSmart website, and we'd love to hear how it's working. Sonia, thanks for joining today.

 

>> Thank you. This has been great.

 

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