Climate and Weather Session - Building Resilience
2025 Rustici Rangeland Science Symposium
Grand Challenges for Rangelands
In the first session of the symposium, Dr. Leslie Roche provided a lens to view the challenges facing our changing landscapes and a path forward with solutions and strategies. Roche's overview highlighted the diverse and highly variable nature of California's rangelands, which supply a multitude of important social, ecological, and economic benefits. Rangeland manager decisions and strategies are embedded and operate within these complex social-ecological systems that are facing multiple simultaneous grand challenges.
Solutions & Strategies?
How do we build climate resilience across California’s rangelands in ways that support their ecological, social, and economic values?
…linking science and management
We need to actively engage across boundaries to leverage knowledge and experience from diverse perspectives. These challenges are complex, we need to expand our knowledge networks with expertise in the biophysical sciences and social sciences and we need to work with the folks on the ground who have the technical and place-based experience and knowledge.
Harness data — big and small — to build climate resilience on California’s working rangelands
Rangeland managers are constantly challenged by characteristic climatic and biophysical diversity, which produces highly variable forage production over both space and time. Advances in remote sensing technologies are providing cost-effective opportunities for rapid, near-real time data that could help managers make data-driven decisions under changing conditions in a climate of extremes.
Grass to Galaxy
Through a collaborative approach with an interdisciplinary team of rangeland scientists, campus faculty, Cooperative Extension advisors, ranchers and land managers, we are creating new remote sensing tools that are locally calibrated with on-ranch monitoring. This work has generated critical insight into the drivers of annual rangeland forage production, especially the timing and distribution of precipitation.
Our shared goal is a cost-effective approach for rapid mapping and assessment of rangeland forage productivity in near real-time and potentially forecasting productivity ranges with manager relevant climate scenarios.
Collaborating with ranchers and rangeland managers to gain direct insights from their perspectives and experiences.
Over the last decade, we’ve collaborated with ranchers and rangeland managers to gain direct insights from their perspectives and experiences in building rangeland resilience to drought and climate change. Climate adaptability improves with strong networks, clear goal setting, experience, and diverse options. Flexibility and adaptive learning are essential—having a diverse set of tools helps managers handle impacts, while continuous learning allows them to effectively respond to changing conditions. Policy and outreach efforts should promote a range of strategies to reduce vulnerability across all types of operations.
This work highlights the importance of building strong relationships across multiple partners, a principle that is central to the mission of the Rustici Rangeland Science Symposium series. By bringing together ranchers, managers, conservationists, policymakers, and scientists, the Symposium fosters collaboration across institutional and political boundaries to promote the sustainability of California's working rangelands.