Browsing by Author "Wilmer, Hailey"

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    Home on the Digital Range: Ranchers' Web Access and Use
    Ghajar, Shayan; Fernández‑Giménez, María E.; Wilmer, Hailey (2019-06)
    Access to the Internet continues to grow in rural areas, ensuring ranchers will have increasing opportunities to use the Web to find information about management practices that may provide them ecological and financial benefits. Although past studies have examined the role of the Internet in informing daily decision making by agricultural producers, no studies have focused specifically on the use of the Internet by ranchers in the western United States. This study uses a mixed-methods approach (a survey and semistructured interviews) to assess the extent and patterns of ranchers' Internet use in Colorado and Wyoming, identify barriers to greater use, and establish a typology of Web use behavior by ranchers. Our findings indicate that Internet use is widespread and that age, education, and risk tolerance predict the extent to which a rancher will rely on the Internet for dayto-day ranch management. A duster analysis delineated four distinct types of Web usage among ranchers: unin-fluenced, focused on sales and herd management, moderately influenced, and an Internet-reliant type. Outreach personnel can use this classification to determine the potential utility of digital outreach tools for their programming on the basis of their target audience and outreach topics.
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    Managing for the middle: rancher care ethics under uncertainty on Western Great Plains rangelands
    Wilmer, Hailey; Fernández‑Giménez, María E.; Ghajar, Shayan; Taylor, Peter Leigh; Souza, Caridad; Derner, Justin D. (2019-12)
    Ranchers and pastoralists worldwide manage and depend upon resources from rangelands (which support indigenous vegetation with the potential for grazing) across Earth's terrestrial surface. In the Great Plains of North America rangeland ecology has increasingly recognized the importance of managing rangeland vegetation heterogeneity to address conservation and production goals. This paradigm, however, has limited application for ranchers as they manage extensive beef production operations under high levels of social-ecological complexity and uncertainty. We draw on the ethics of care theoretical framework to explore how ranchers choose management actions. We used modified grounded theory analysis of repeated interviews with ranchers to (1) compare rancher decision-making under relatively certain and uncertain conditions and (2) describe a typology of practices used to prioritize and choose management actions that maintain effective stewardship of these often multi-generational ranches. We contrast traditional decision-making frameworks with those described by interviewees when high levels of environmental and market uncertainty or ecological complexity led ranchers toward use of care-based, flexible and relational frameworks for decision-making. Ranchers facing complexity and uncertainty often sought "middle-ground" strategies to balance multiple, conflicting responsibilities in rangeland social-ecological systems. For example, ranchers' care-based decision-making leads to conservative stocking approaches to "manage for the middle," e.g. to limit risk under uncertain weather and forage availability conditions. Efforts to promote heterogeneity-based rangeland management for biodiversity conservation through the restoration of patch burn grazing and prairie dog conservation will require increased valuation of ranchers' care work.