Managing the range: The USU chapter of the Society for Range Management
“If you grew up in Utah or in the West, you grew up surrounded by rangelands,” said Eric LaMalfa, associate professor of wildland resources at Utah State University.
According to LaMalfa, despite covering approximately half of the earth’s surface, many people don’t know what rangelands are.
Students in the USU chapter of the Society for Range Management are not only learning what rangelands are — wild landscapes without many trees — but also how to care for them.
As future rangeland managers, they learn about managing vegetation for ecosystem services, the tangible benefits wildlands provide for people. These include supporting Utah’s hunting and recreation industries. Managers also help protect habitats.
“We farm wildlands to reap these benefits. Instead of planting crops like alfalfa and wheat and corn, we plant sagebrush. We plant native grasses and flowering plants that are the critical food and critical habitat, the cover that wild animals need to hide from predators and basically to maintain their populations,” LaMalfa said.
The society helps prepare students for these jobs by giving them opportunities to make professional connections and hone their skills. It includes livestock producers, scientists, government employees and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Chapter President Carson Rodriguez said society members recently visited Monterey, California for the annual society meeting, where they participated in a variety of competitions against students from the United States, Mexico and Canada.
“You can compete in the Undergraduate Range Management Exam, which is essentially just testing your knowledge on a range of topics,” Rodriguez said.
A major part of the competition is plant identification, something LaMalfa believes will help participants long-term, since invasive species are responsible for many major environmental issues.
Sterling Brinkerhoff is a senior studying plant science. Though he’s not a rangeland ecology and management major, he’s found a home for his interests in the society. He’s interested in the cultivation of wild and native crops and is currently working with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation to create an Indigenous garden.
At this year’s National Society for Range Management meeting, Brinkerhoff attended a seminar about the Indigenous utilization of rangelands and plans to use what he learned in his own project.
“Going to the annual conference has been a really fabulous experience to network with people in the field who have years more experience than I do and are able to give me insights on some of the projects I’ve been working on,” Brinkerhoff said. “The seminars that they’ve held here have been instrumental in what I’ve been working on, and I just see that this is going to be a large part of my life for years to come.”
At the meeting, students attended a job fair, where they met industry professionals in a variety of niches, from electric fence suppliers to federal bureaus. Students heard the latest research, had opportunities to present their own and could leave the conference to tour local rangeland.
Though Brinkerhoff wasn’t able to attend the site tours himself, he said other students had the opportunity to visit a variety of grasslands and wetlands in California or even make a trip to Hawaii.
LaMalfa called these experiences invaluable for students and said he’s been attending these meeting since he was an undergrad.
“They’re meeting potential employers. They are networking with other students from other colleges and universities,” LaMalfa said. “I still see friends of mine that I met as an undergrad that are now working for the [U.S] Forest Service or the NRCS [National Resources Conservation Service]. I see old colleagues that are now at different universities.”
LaMalfa said at the meeting, usual conflicts over land use are traded for collaboration.
“Everybody there is there because they care about all these things and they want to be learning the best science and meeting other people that are willing to try new things,” LaMalfa said.