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There are some qualities and conditions of southwestern grassland ecosystems, ecological qualities and current social and political conditions, that make grasslands extremely difficult to manage in a sustainable way. Some of those conditions are related to the ecology of grasslands. To be ecologically functional, grasslands must be large enough to support processes like fire. Fire must be able to burn through a pretty large area to have the effect of creating a mosaic of patchwork conditions that characterize healthy grasslands. Grasslands need to be large to sustain migratory ungulates and they must be open across large areas to function as the corridors between mountain ranges for animals like bears, deer, bighorn sheep that travel from one mountain range to another. Grasslands require large areas to sustain them ecologically and to sustain them economically, from the point of view of ranching. Here in the southwest, to be sustainable livestock operation needs large areas in which to move the stock around and make the most effective use of variation in rainfall, and productivity, across the landscape.
On top of the pattern of ecological need for large size, these grasslands are located in valley bottoms where we have a complex mosaic of land ownership with state land, many private owners, and often some federal ownership. So to consider managing these grassland landscapes in a large, ecologically meaningful scale, you have to deal with a lot of the land owners, many of whom have different ideas about what they want to do with their land. This creates combined problems of maintaining ecological function and being organized socially as a community to keep sustainable management activities going on a suitable scale.
We are faced with multiple challenges in grassland landscapes and we don't really understand how to solve the problems of ecological sustainability or long-term economic sustainability. We have tremendous need for good information, and better distribution of information, about ecological and economic aspects of grassland management. We don't really understand how to apply fire in the most cost effective and ecologically effective way. There are some information needs, and some research needs, to help us understand how to use fire.
Typically if you're a commercial ranching operation you do not have the spare pastures and the spare time to do fire research. Generally the open valley-bottom grasslands do not have very much research going on to help understand how to improve grassland management, so there could be a role for non-profits in improving our understanding of ecological management of grasslands.
In most southwestern grasslands with complex ownership patterns, the history has been of landowners operating very independently from one another. We don't have a history of working together as a community to manage these landscapes on a large scale. In many cases existing
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Arizona Nature Conservancy, Tucson AZ.
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ranches are too small to be managed sustainably for the long term· due to the great unpredictability of rainfall in time and space. If neighboring ranches could be managed together in a way that allows utilization of the patchy pattern of productivity this could contribute to the economic sustainability of grasslands. Non-profits can have a role in encouraging this kind of cooperation.
The combination of ecological and social factors make grasslands extremely difficult to manage. The session today will deal with organizing ourselves into community groups and nonprofit organizations that may be able to solve some of these questions. The main point that I would like to get across in the session today is that non-profit organizations can take many forms and they can serve many functions.
We have speakers here today who can talk about the tremendous variety of activities that non-profit organizations are doing in grasslands of the southwest, ranging from Ben Brown talking about the Animas Foundation what they're doing and how their activities in community cooperation contribute to grassland management, to Tom Collazo who will be talking about what
The Nature Conservancy is doing, with a focus on the research end of things in many cases.
Dennis Moroney from Prescott will talk about the Santa Maria Mountains group, maybe a little bit about the Central Arizona Land Trust. Bill Branan will talk about what the Audubon Society is doing with their research ranch and what they see their role is. And finally Bill McDonald will talk about what Malpai Borderlands Group is doing.
That's all I want to say for now, that non-profit organizations can play many roles both on the ecological/scientific side, and on the community organization side to help find solutions for some of these very difficult issues concerning grassland management.
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