Topic: Rangeland Complexity – A systems approach to grazing management.
Rangeland ecosystems possess self-organizing feedback relationships that modify resource structure and performance in myriad ways, that coupled to socio-economic signals drive management decisions. These systems can be characterized as dynamically complex systems which self-organize in ways to produce emergent properties that are historically path dependent yet are capable of endogenously generating surprise behaviors. In dynamic settings such as these, complexity tends of overwhelm decision makers’ abilities which contribute to poor performance. Scientific training has also tended to “silo” problems into specific domains that don’t always reflect real-world conditions. The net result are managers that develop decision-making heuristics or “short cuts” that satisfice rather than optimize system performance. To illustrate the scientific contributions capable of arising from the systems approach and to fill some of the gaps described above, this lecture will center around the development and application of a rangeland ecosystem model which integrates ecosystem processes, grazing livestock pressure, and human
decision-making pertaining to management of stocking rates in cow-calf systems representative of South Texas. Results will highlight model use for ranch context-specific grazing insights generation, and more broadly, operational means to test the resiliency of managed rangeland systems which accounts for short- and long-term interaction and feedback effects.
