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[Rylee] Welcome to the ASCCing the Experts podcast, where every day is a good day to ask a question. This podcast is provided by the Adaptative Silviculture for Climate Change (or ASCC) Network, which is a collaborative effort to establish a series of experimental silvicultural trials across different forest ecosystems in the United States and Canada. In each episode, we bring you up-to-date findings from natural resource professionals who are conducting applied research related to climate adaptation and ecosystem management. We hope that platforming these individuals and their work will lead to more a widespread understanding of the importance of climate adaptive management and improved ecological outcomes in North American ecosystems. Thank you for tuning in!

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[Rylee] Good morning, everyone. This is your host Rylee McMillan and today I’m here with Dr. Jake Courkamp, who is a research scientist at Colorado State University studying rangeland weed ecology. Specifically, Jake’s research centers on managing invasive weeds like Bromus Tectorum, aka cheatgrass, to maintain healthy rangeland ecology in the Western United States. As a part of his position at CSU, Jake teaches multiple courses including rangeland measurements, grassland and shrubland ecology, and rangeland herbivore ecology and management. These courses prepare students to effectively monitor and manage rangeland ecosystems, and to consider the implications of management at different scales. I was a student of one of Jakes classes this year, and found the content to be incredibly useful, so I’m excited to help share some of that with you all today.

[Rylee] Thank you, Jake, for joining me for this interview.

[Jake] Yeah no, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here and excited and I’m excited to talk to you and yeah, let’s get go ahead and get started.

[Rylee] Awesome. So, our conversation today will center on the importance of rangeland management, especially amidst changing environmental conditions. For the past seven years, your work has centered on performing management actions to prevent the spread of noxious or undesirable weeds. Could you please share a little bit more about your research and how it informs management on the ground?

[Jake] Yeah so… Thinking about my research I’m sort of a classically trained range ecologist. So, I wear a lot of different hats, and I work on a lot of different things, ranging all the way from, you know, livestock management, to invasive weeds, to soil carbon, to invasive plant mapping. All of these different things are sort of wrapped up in my research program. But I think the focus of it, sort of the centerpiece of it, is managing invasive plants, or noxious weeds, or just weeds in general, really any sort of undesirable vegetation. Managing that in natural or sort of semi-natural systems, right? Places where, you know, we’re not talking about row crop agriculture. We’re talking about rangelands, diverse communities, fairly wild places, but also places that are being used, right? Used for livestock grazing or maybe you’re reclaiming an oil and gas well pad or, you know, there’s some sort of anthropogenic, umbrella or influence sort of exerting itself.

[Jake] And, you know, we’re trying to figure out how to manage the undesirable vegetation while at the same time promoting the desirable vegetation. And that’s sort of like the key challenge there is that we have a lot of ways of killing plants, but it’s a little harder when we’re talking about killing specific plants and saving or maintaining the plants that we that we want.

[Jake] And so, when it comes to informing management on the ground… You know, I think most of the research that I’m engaged in is derived from manager interests. So, these are things like where I’m talking with a weed manager in this county or that county and they’re like, I’m seeing this or I’m facing this particular species in this particular environment, and I’m having trouble, sort of getting a handle on it or stopping it from spreading. Right. And then I come in and sort of think about ways to creatively use different tools to solve that problem.

[Jake] So, an example of that is I’ve been working on research in Boulder County looking at integrating livestock grazing with herbicide applications to control invasive reed canary grass. So, reed canary grass is like an invasive grass. It was introduced a long time ago for cattle forage. It’s highly nutritious, very palatable. The cattle really seem to like it. And so, by using a combination of herbicide applications at specific times of year to target the reed canary grass and not necessarily target those desirable plants, and then kind of layering on top of that the selective herbivory of cattle grazing, we can sort of figure out ways of taking communities that are just dominated by this one species of grass and sort of over time, shifting them to a more diverse, sort of a wetland plant community, you know, sort of a… it’s like the one project I’m doing that’s, that’s not like dry, arid, rainless kind of place.

[Jake] So, that’s an example. But, you know, I think it’s really about listening to the managers and then trying to leverage the time and energy that I have to solve their problems. Right. Because they’re dealing with managing seasonals and next year’s budget and all of these things that aren’t explicitly related to learning about how to solve a problem. Right. So many times the like key limitation there is like knowledge, like sort of understanding, what is going on and taking the practical tools and sort of combining it with ecological understanding and trying to find ways to solve problems, more  like with a scalpel than with like a, a cleaver. Right. We’re trying to be careful about how we’re managing the vegetation. And so I think, pretty much most of what I’m working on is applied and directly related to, you know, something that a manager could do to address a specific problem.

[Rylee] Thanks for sharing that, Jake. I bet it’s realty rewarding to get to connect with managers and support their objectives through your research. Though I understand it could be challenging to meet their goals when it comes to species preservation and removal. One question I have is, in your work with mangers, have you encountered any notable climate change related challenges? If so, how did you overcome those challenges?

[Jake] Yeah. That’s a really good question. And I have been kind of like driving around and working out in the field, and… knowing that we were going to be talking and understanding that this is, Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change. And thinking about how climate change influences my work. And it’s not straightforward. And it’s not straightforward because, you know, if you think about right, there’s like more solar radiation in, in Earth’s system. Right. That’s like way upstream of, you know, the vegetation that’s present in a particular location at a particular time. And so, it’s almost like this big ominous black cloud that hangs over everything. But it’s really difficult to know how to respond to it.

[Jake]  It does come up in my work in that, like, I think about it, and the managers I work with are thinking about it, and all the stakeholders are thinking about it, and we’re like trying to use it to kind of plan for the future, this understanding that things are likely to change and that that change is likely to accelerate over time.

[Jake] I think that is something that’s worth thinking about in like all aspects of ecosystem management. But it’s really challenging to be specific, right? Like, I’m trying to figure out how to how to control a particular type of plant in a particular place at a particular time with a particular set of constraints. And so, it’s like climate change is one of those constraints, but it’s also not something that we can necessarily factor in just because there is this component of variability from year to year, which, like managers have always been dealing with variability and so, as that variability incrementally becomes more extreme, it’s like… To people like me. Like scientists viewing this from the from the outside, we can really see that happening. But I sometimes I think it’s kind of lost, when you’re viewing these problems through a management lens just because, like, it’s really just like an exaggeration of a challenge that, to me seems, like it’s existed forever.

[Jake] And so, like, I can’t really say that… There aren’t a lot of specific examples of climate change sort of, influencing things that I’m working on. But what I will say is that weeds. Right. Invasive plants, non-native plants, they are almost by definition less adapted to the environment where they are occurring than those native plants. And so I do think intuitively, it makes sense to me that climate change will favor invasion, because so often these weeds that take advantage of the shoulder seasons. Right. So something like cheatgrass, if you’re like out in an open space around Fort Collins or really like anywhere temperate where cheatgrass is a problem. Right. You see it right now, it’s about an inch tall, two inches tall. It’s bright green. Everything else is brown. And it’s growing, it’s photosynthesizing. It’s growing it’s roots deeper. It’s setting itself up for success in the spring, when it will wake up and start growing earlier than most of the native plants. And so it really takes advantage of these shoulder seasons. And I think as the climate warms, those shoulder seasons… Intuitively, to me it seems like those shoulder seasons are likely to expand. And I think that’s going to create opportunities for weeds to show up in places where we maybe thought they wouldn’t in the past.

[Jake] The good thing about that is that it also creates more opportunities for management, because, you know, when those weeds are growing and all the native plants are dormant, that’s a great opportunity for a chemical tool, an herbicide that’s going to kill those green growing plants, but that is going to degrade and break down quickly enough in the environment that by the time those native plants wake up from dormancy, they’re not going to be affected anymore. And so, it’s a challenge in that I think it’s going to create more opportunities for invasive plants to thrive. But, assuming we’re on top of it on the management side, might also create more opportunities to effectively manage those invasive plants without harming the co-occurring native plants.

[Jake] And so I’m thinking about that all the time. Running herbicide trials, trying to figure out what’s the right time to apply, what’s the right rate to apply. Things like droplet sizes, all of these adjuvants, things you’re adding in. All of these different things, go into, figuring out how to most effectively manage unwanted vegetation. And all of that is likely to change as the climate changes. Right. It’s likely to shift. The timing that worked for a long time may not work so well anymore. And so, it’s there. It’s constantly sort of hanging over what I’m doing, but it’s very challenging to be specific just because it’s so far downstream from, you know, that increase in solar radiation that is sort of driving this climate warming that we’re observing.

[Rylee] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate your perspective as a range scientist where you’re working around such high temporal variability already that it could be difficult to parse out the role of climate change in determining that variability. In working with the ASCC Network, which is silviculture focused, we see these effects a lot more dramatically, since the plant communities we’re working with exist on such long time scales and vary less year to year.

[Rylee]  I do appreciate how you pointed out that you might expect some of the weeds you work with to be favored as a result of those changing conditions and especially because of the expansion of the shoulder season. And that, that shift could be an opportunity for more active management, which leads us into our next question.

[Rylee] I recognize that a lot of your work involves actively managing rangelands, and weeds specifically, to direct desired change. Some people make arguments that a no-action or passive management plan makes more sense for rangeland systems, given the high interannual and intraseasonal variability we discussed. My question is, do you think active management is the best pathway for managing rangelands?

[Jake] The first thing to say there is that… You know, it’s all about progress towards an objective, for me, thinking about ecosystem management. Right. And so, like, if I identify some desired future condition that I want to kind of navigate to. Right. Then I think about ways of going about getting there.

[Jake] And I think you bring up a really good point. And I think people who sort of advocate for those passive approaches, they that makes a lot of sense. Right. And I think like assuming that you’re making progress towards your objective with a passive approach, that passive approach makes the most sense. If the progress towards the objectives is equal with a passive and an active approach, then I think logically it always makes sense to sort of maximize or leverage the benefits gained from very low resource inputs, which is what would be associated with that passive approach.

[Jake] So, management is always going to be a mix of the two. It’s going to be like identifying objectives that can be met or moved towards with the passive approach, and then differentiating those from situations where you sort of need to be a little more aggressive with what you’re doing.

[Jake] And so, thinking about rangeland weed ecology, weed invasion, non-native plants. There are invasive weeds that, if you maybe shift your management to change your grazing schedule, graze a little heavier, graze a little lighter, graze, you know, different types of livestock that eat different things. There are weeds that will sort of respond to that more passive approach. Right? Not a truly passive approach, just like completely hands off, but like shifting management can change the ecology of a place such that some weeds are disfavored and other plants are favored. Right. And so that’s like a subcategory of weeds. I might put something like, you know, and this is debatable, but I might put something like Russian thistle in that category.

[Jake] Russian thistle is everywhere. It’s an extraordinarily prolific seed producer. It thrives on disturbance. But assuming you sort of take care of that disturbance, that repeated continued disturbance, it’s not something that’s necessarily going to outcompete, perennial bunch grasses over time. Right. And so, you have those where it’s like, yeah, there’s like a passive, or a more passive, approach that’s going to help with that. And then those are sort of in contrast to invasive plants that if you don’t actively manage them, they’re not going anywhere.

[Jake] So, something like leafy spurge, would be a good example of that. Right. It’s deep rooted. It’s got tons of nutrient reserves underground. It’s extraordinarily difficult to kill. It sort of spreads. It creeps and patches grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And it excludes more and more things. And if you don’t intervene, that is likely to continue until that plant species reaches some threshold of environmental tolerance, where it’s gone as high in elevation as it can and it’s two cold, or it’s gone as low an elevation as it can and it’s too warm.

[Jake] Right. It’s going to need to bump up on some sort of threshold of environmental tolerance for it to stop unless you actively engage in managing it. And so, I think what makes the most sense in each case is going to depend on the characteristics of the problem. It’s going to depend on the weed, the environment where the weed is a problem, and it’s going to depend on the tools you have available to manage to manage it, and the cost or the effort involved in implementing those tools, you know, but broadly, I kind of feel like it’s a little bit naive to think about the, impacts that humans have on the ecology of wherever they live. And not think that there will need to be some kind of active management moving forward.

[Jake] Weed management is a never ending problem. Right. It’s absolutely a never ending problem that you can get everything right, do everything at the right time with the right tool, in the right place. And, you know, there will be a new species, or you’ll have a reintroduction of the one that was the problem in the past.

[Jake] Right. There’s no getting away from the need to.. To like, nudge vegetation communities in different directions when the time is right, based on our understanding. And there are times when we get it really wrong, and there are times when we get it right and we have a whole bunch to learn. And each individual situation is different. But, we want to sort of envision the future that we desire and then figure out how to navigate our way, there. And I think in most cases that is going to involve some sort of direct manipulation of a vegetation community at some point in time. You know, you might only need to intervene and manage this species or that species every five or 10 or 15 years. But on some timescale. Right. You start thinking about decades and centuries. The likelihood that you’re not going to have a weed problem in any one place on that long time horizon is extremely small. At least intuitively, it seems that way to me. Once you sort of accept that and internalize that, then it becomes, you know, how do we make the tools we have most effective. Right. How do we do the most we can with the least amount of resource inputs.

[Jake] But, accepting axiomatically that there’s going to need to be some sort of intervention if we want to keep using these landscapes the way we’re using them. And we want to also sort of blend that use with their ecology, then that’s going to require humans to sort of step up and manage those ecosystems. And so, then it’s like it’s on us to choose the diverse community. Right. It’s on is on us to choose the ecologically healthy community, whatever that means. Wherever you’re working. You know, it’s like I don’t see the human intervention part of it in a negative way, because I think because I think we have the capacity to choose the values that we want to maximize. And those values can be ecologically informed. We can just choose to desire a community that is diverse and functioning and resilient to disturbance, and all of these things, provides habitat for wildlife, all of these things we value. When we accept that there’s going to be some level of active management, then it just becomes really important to make the case for those values. That’s sort of where I see it. Right. It’s like if you can make something better, you should make it better. And then it’s like figuring out where and when that makes the most sense.

[Rylee] Great, thanks for expanding on that Jake. I think your answer really speaks to how management is conducted based on objectives and desired future conditions, which vary significantly between ecosystems and stakeholders. I agree that, though passive management can seem like the easiest route, if we want to maintain ecosystem function, manager often need to step in—especially considering our changing climate. And I second your thought that it’s the responsibility of folks who have the knowledge and capacity to direct change to do so in a way that’s ecologically sound and supports local communities

[Rylee] So, in connection to your response I wanted to chat a bit about the course of yours that I took, rangeland measurements. In this course, you teach students how to create good management objectives and perform measurements tailored to those objectives. Can you expand on what elements you think are needed to make a good management objective?

[Jake] Yeah. You’d think this one would be simple, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s probably more complicated than, than it seems. So, like we can talk about the, the elements of a good management objective, but know essentially they all sort of boil down into be as specific as possible.

[Jake] I think it’s important to… because you could just sort of cut that off and you could say be specific. Right. And you need to be this specific. But I think that’s kind of limiting when you consider the sort of sprawling complexity of ecosystem management. Right. And ecology and all of these things. And so, in some cases you’re going to be able to be more specific than in others. In some cases, you might be able to define the time horizon that is meaningful. In other cases, you might not be able to. In some cases, you might, narrow your focus to a specific spot, right? You might have a specific patch of weeds. That is the sole, sort of, focus of that management objective. Other times you might be thinking about, you know, something like cheatgrass in the West, which is like one third, I think, of the Intermountain West is infested with cheatgrass above 15% Canopy cover is our best estimate.

[Jake] So, like there you can’t really focus in on a specific spot or a specific set of environmental constraints that you’re working within. I think broadly, it makes sense to zoom in to the smallest spatio-temporal scale that is meaningful to the problem that you’re working on. Right. So, sort of eliminate as much of that external complexity as possible and sort of zoom in on that one specific place and then… Well, I guess I should say there too, that like some problems, you can’t do that. And it’s like, so are we just going to ignore those big scale problems because we can’t define objectives in a specific way? I think that is the wrong approach to. And so, it’s like, again, I feel like I’ve said this a million times, but it’s like it’s specific to each circumstance; it’s specific to each problem; it’s specific to each issue or challenge. And so you want to almost sidestep as much of that variability as possible by narrowing your spatio-temporal scale as much as you can. Right. And then within that spatial temporal scale that is relevant to your problem, I think it makes sense to be as specific as you can be. When you’re formulating a good management objective

[Jake] You want to have as high of confidence as you can, that you can determine whether or not you’re progressing towards that management objective, or maybe you’re just in a static situation, or maybe you’re actually going in the wrong direction, and you really need to rethink what you’re doing and adapt your management. So, think about your problem. Eliminate as much, unimportant heterogeneity as you can, in sort of thinking it through like your mental model. And then after eliminating as much heterogeneity as you can be as specific as possible so that you can track progress. Right. So, you can reliably measure progress.

[Jake] But I will say that at each step in that process there are constraints that limit your ability to do the things that I just described right. They limit your ability to sidestep spatial and temporal variation. They limit your ability to be specific about this or that constraint or goal or outcome. And the key is it’s still worth coming up with objectives even when you can’t be as specific as you’d like. It’s still worth thinking it through. And getting as close as you can to that specific measurable outcome that you’ve sort of defined as desirable, either on your own or with a big stakeholder group, or however you got to you’re your desired future state.

[Rylee] Thanks for sharing that, Jake. I appreciate your thoughts on this topic, which really is more complicated than it seems. Like you said, it can be extremely difficult for managers to form objectives that are specific to their scenario, but still broad enough that they consider external factors like climate change.

[Rylee] Continuing on, in the course rangeland measurements, you also teach students how to use tools like ecological site descriptions and state and transition models to assess the health of rangelands and to make management objectives. Some believe that these tools are becoming less widely applicable as our climate continues to shift. Do you agree with that statement?

[Jake] Well I think it’s almost like self-evidently true. Right. It almost has to be true that if, you know, there are changes occurring at the global level, that they will filter down to differences that will happen within the scale of an individual ecological site. Right? So like I think that it must be true that those tools are becoming less relevant as the rate of environmental change accelerates.

[Jake] We talked about this in class, you know, that there’s been this process right where range science has sort of incrementally improved these tools. Right. We went from like very basic Clementsian succession to like Gleasonian in Plant Community Assembly, where we’re thinking more about sort of chance and just sort of less deterministic. There’s more possibility for things to be variable. And then, you know, you take those sort of fundamental concepts of plant biology and you go to like a range science description that becomes an ecological site description that, at some point, doesn’t have a state-and-transition model included. But then we start to build state-and-transition models for that ecological site.

[Jake] And so I think, you know, the key to the utility of something like an ecological site description or state-and-transition model is understanding that it’s the product of that process. Right. That, like, we’re not necessarily at the end of that process. And it’s valuable to collect the insights that scientists and managers have gained into one kind of living repository document, like an ecological site description, that we can reference or use when we have nothing else available. Right. When we’re dealing with a place where I’ve never been there or I don’t really have a background working in this particular place, like where can I start? Well, I should like try and find some colleagues who do have direct experience, and I should talk to them, and I should look at the ecological site description to sort of frame my understanding, to make that conversation more fruitful.

[Jake] Thinking about like, something like a state-and-transition model, I think is just a useful way to parameterize, your thinking about stable states and shifts from one community type to another community type and sort of understanding the resistance and resilience of a given plant community, like knowing what’s possible.

[Jake] But they’re all approximations. They’ve always been in approximation. Some are better than others. I think it’s certainly possible to even question the utility of something like that without climate change kind of accelerating these, you know, environmental shifts that we’re observing. But, you know, it’s, it’s really… The utility of them emerges from that understanding. That it’s a work in progress where we’re trying to incrementally improve the way we interact with knowledge of these particular places.

[Jake] And so climate change is certainly reducing the utility or the applicability of those tools. Right. But that’s just like that’s a challenge that we have to adapt to.

[Rylee] Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. Our tools are really only as good as the knowledge and resources we have to use and maintain them. Do you think there’s any way that we can improve these tools to better suit the needs of rangeland managers into the future?

[Jake] Yeah. There are certainly ways they can be improved. I think it’s like, sort of, an unsatisfying answer because like, my answer to that is just like, keep learning. Keep sort of interacting with ecosystems and paying attention to what happens. Keep collecting insights. Keep generating these, useful details, and adding them and synthesizing them and, building that record to an even greater degree. Right. to make it more useful.

[Jake] So that’s like a really nonspecific, very unsatisfying answer to your question. I think a lot about, you know, like, what is the next thing. Right. Because I just sort of like laid out that progression from like Clementsian vegetation succession through range site descriptions, to ecological site descriptions, to state-and-transition models. And so, it’s like that is… Where we’re at now is very unlikely to be the terminus of that line of reasoning.

[Jake] And so what’s next? What’s like the next thing. And to me, I think it needs to be something that is completely detached from what you might call like the historic climax plant community or like the ideal sort of pristine understanding of the potential, the ecological potential of a given place. I think whatever comes next needs to explicitly sort of disavow that kind of thinking and understand that you can only start where you are, right, that you’re sort of forced into this box of you are facing a set of constraints with a with a given array of resources and management options and thinking about how to go from where you are to someplace slightly better than where you are. Right. I think it needs to be something that takes into account that limitation. That you can only start where you are.

[Jake] The challenge with that is that it means that everything has to be site-specific. It has to be spatio-temporally, tuned in to one specific place, to one specific set of circumstances. And so that means that we really can’t generalize. Right. There are these giant ecosystems, biomes, landscapes, millions of acres, all of this internal environmental heterogeneity. And what I’m saying is that I think we need to adapt our thinking to each specific set of circumstances within that overall umbrella. And that is a challenge that we have never been able to deal with.

[Jake] We are lumping things together at a scale that is so much bigger than I think is productive. But there’s a reason why ecologists and managers have done that, and it’s because they lack the capacity to be more specific. And so, I’m hopeful that we can leverage technology, to address some of these gaps, collect more data more quickly in more places with less money, less resources.

[Jake] That we can at least start to work along that trajectory of being specific. Right. And that that will open up possibilities for thinking about ecosystems in ways that like a state-and-transition model or an ecological site description can’t, because we will have specific knowledge of a specific place where we can we can start from that. We don’t have to start from this giant assumption of what the potential of this place might have been a long time ago.

[Jake] Right. So like, when I think about what’s next, I think about using technology like just training hundreds and hundreds of range scientists and sending them out to collect data and solve problems and think things through in ways that are, sensitive to, conservation and ecology and all these values that we’re trying to promote.

[Jake] But I think… I think we need to get away. I think we need to step away from this connection to the past and think about where we are now and where we want to go and how we get there. And so, what I would like is an ecological site for each specific place. But that’s an enormous challenge, right?

[Jake] It’s almost like I’m eliminating all potential resource constraints to think that. You know, like I’m saying that like, if I had all the money, all the time, all the resources, all the grad students, I could do this. Like I could just infinitely scale the capacity of range science to address these challenges. That’s wildly unrealistic, but my hope is that we could maybe take a few steps in that direction.

[Rylee] Thanks, Jake. It’s a really daunting task to keep those tools up-to-date, and even more so to expand them. Making and maintaining ecological site descriptions for every rangeland in the world would certainly be ideal. But like you said, getting that site-specific information, even initially, costs time, money, and resources that we don’t generally have—and that we definitely don’t have for continuous monitoring.

 [Rylee] Since, like you mentioned, that’s a pretty unsatisfying answer, is there anything that you are maybe more hopeful about, or makes you an optimist, regarding the future of rangeland and weed management?

[Jake] I’ve always kind of struggled with the idea of being optimistic or pessimistic, particularly about something as big and sprawling as ecosystem or rangeland management. There are times where it makes sense to be optimistic, and there are times when it makes sense to be pessimistic. But I don’t necessarily think it makes sense to be an optimist or be a pessimist.

[Jake] Right. And so, I’m optimistic, like, you know, students like you. A lot of the other students I have, you make me very optimistic. Right. You definitely, like, make me think that there’s a bright future out there somewhere, at some time horizon. There are times when it’s difficult to stay positive. But on some time horizon, we just sort of have to figure this out. Right. We kind of have to figure this out.

[Jake] I’m optimistic in that, I think, the incentives to solving some of these problems will at some point become so great that we will just have to solve the problems. Right. We’ll just have to figure it out.

[Jake] I think what makes me most hopeful in my contemporary life, my life outside of my work is like there are places that make me optimistic. And I guess this isn’t so detached from my work, but it cuts across all of the boundaries.

[Jake] You know, I’ve had the opportunity to work doing grazing monitoring on allotments for the National Park Service. And so, these are places like, you know, Grand Teton and Petrified Forest and Capitol Reef. But I’m going to the places where it’s not a campground, it’s not, scenic overlook. This is a grazing allotment. Right. And so, like, these are the most working, sort of least, recreational or least preservationist parts of these places. And they’re, they’re spectacular. They’re wonderful. There are plants there that I have never seen anywhere else. There’s wildlife. There’s all these different things. And so, a place like that where you have something that is being influenced by people in a very direct way, and at the same time, it’s like I can look at it as an ecologist and say, this is in pretty good shape. This is a special place. It’s a special place, and it’s a grazing allotment.

[Jake] And that’s something that I think, I’ve encountered a lot in my career. Pretty much all the jobs I’ve ever done have been related in one way or another… Well, prior to getting my PhD… Related in one way or another to, some type of economic activity, whether, you know, I think in most cases it’s livestock grazing. I’ve been to a lot of places where there are feral horses. You know, a lot of my favorite fishing spots are like right next to giant highways. You know. And it’s just like there are these unique and cool and functioning systems that are really in super close proximity to profound changes, due to human influences. And the fact that I can, like, see that resilience in my day to day life, I think, makes me optimistic about particular places.

[Jake] My favorite place, you know, that I can drive to, from Fort Collins, is the North Platte River in the middle of Wyoming. Right. I really like to fly fish. It’s like probably my number one hobby. This is a place where you have three giant reservoirs, huge hydroelectric dams. The system is profoundly human. But you go up there and there are bighorn sheep rams with full curls. Sometimes you see two or three of them in a day. You see big herds of mule deer and elk. You see bald eagles catching fish out of the river. Right. You just like, watch it happen. The river is full of wild, wild fish. And I just think that like, if a place like that, that is so profoundly human, can also support the diversity and the ecology that it does. I think that there’s, reason to be optimistic.

[Jake] I feel like as our capacity to change our environment increases, so does our responsibility to choose to emphasize the values beyond just, what we might extract from it or profit from it. And I think there are lots of ways to take those ecological values and maintain them in the context of human use. We can find ways to more seamlessly weave together the human uses of a landscape, with the ecological value or the ecological function.

[Jake] And those terms are like, they’re very kind of nebulous. Right. They’re very nonspecific. And I’m like always trying to be more specific. But, you know, I think that there are places that make me optimistic. All the students I work with make me optimistic. There are lots of things that challenge, that optimism. But ultimately, I just think that at some point, the incentive to solve the problem of integrating human flourishing with ecological functioning, with biodiversity, with the things we value through a more conservation lens. I think the incentive to do that will be so great that we will just have to solve these problems. So, I’m not overly optimistic, but I’m not pessimistic about it either.

[Rylee] Thanks, Jake. I think that’s a really practical viewpoint. And I like that you pointed out how certain places make you feel hopeful, because they are thriving despite human influence. The joy felt from experiencing special natural spaces is certainly something that I can resonate with, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners can resonate with that as well. I want to end on that point because I think that’s really beautiful, but before we wrap up, is there anything else related your field, or natural resources generally, that you’d like to share with our listeners?

[Jake] I’ll just make a plug for rangeland science, for rangeland ecology. It is something that encompasses so much of, what students are excited about, what people are interested in. Things from vegetation management, livestock grazing, restoration ecology, wildlife management, all of these things are like parts of rangeland management. And so, going in that direction, choosing to work in that way, like it’s exciting, it’s fun. There’s always lots of different things to work on. You know, rangelands are interesting because they’re defined by what they aren’t. They aren’t rock, they aren’t ocean and they aren’t ice and they’re not forest. I’m sure I’m overlooking something. But if in general you kind of rule out those things, you’re left with rangeland.

[Jake] It can be kind of infuriating because again, it’s not specific. And we’ve just keep coming back to this. Like I just feel like we need to be as specific as possible. And range is not that you can do a lot of different things with it, but it’s also exciting and fun, and there are lots of different things to work on. And you get to learn lots of cool stuff from lots of experts and all these different fields and try and find a way to synthesize them and apply them in a way that is useful and helpful.

[Jake]  And so, you know, to any students out there that might be confused and don’t know what they want to do, and they can’t really decide on anything specific. You know, I might just say like try range ecology because I had no intention of winding up where I did. But I love it. It’s cool. It’s fun. I get to think about these big, complicated, challenging problems and try and help just a little bit here and there. It’s exciting. It’s fun. And I think it’s worth thinking about if you’re a student, or professional, and you don’t really know you have a hard time settling on any one thing. Range could be the perfect place for you.

[Jake]  So, that’s all I’ll say. But yeah, thank you for having me. This was super fun. It’s great to have the opportunity to just, like, sit with some of these really big questions and think about, you know, what the best way to answer them is.

[Rylee] Sweet, thank you, Jake. And yeah, I absolutely agree, as a student who couldn’t decide what they wanted to do, I always loved range because of the freedom it offers. It’s really just an awesome field to work in and I’m so grateful to be able to do it and interact with so many inspiring folks like you doing truly amazing work. Thank you so much, Jake, for being on the podcast and sharing your thoughts about rangeland and weed management.

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[Rylee] For our listeners, please check out the definitions and resources linked in the episode description, including the ASCC Network website, for more information about topics discussed in this episode. And remember to look for our next episode, which will feature a discussion with NIACS researcher Dr. Adrienne Keller about above- and below-ground forest carbon. Thank you for listening in. And thank you again, Jake, for coming on the podcast today. Have a wonderful week everybody!

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