On January 31, Angela Fletcher (Senior Researcher and Data and Tools Manager) presented our collaboration with the Natural Resources Conservation Services valuing the co-benefits of rangeland management in the southwestern US at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Range Management in Sparks, NV. She summarized the results of the work, which reveal a broad sense of the economic importance of rangeland conservation investment in providing non-market benefits to communities.
That project sought to replicate our earlier rangeland ecosystem service valuation framework in a new region, while improving and expanding those efforts. We include additional (and more detailed) data on the effects of conservation practices on rangeland health, as well as the effects of additional conservation practices that were not considered in the prior work. We also show how the framework can be expanded to rangelands managed by other federal agencies (e.g. Bureau of Land Management) and to other land resource regions (i.e. the Western Range and Irrigated Region, known as LRR D).
Read more about these efforts at our Conservation and Communities page.