Viewpoint: New Approaches and Protocols for Grazing Management Research
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Managers need information to understand functional processes and principles, not prescriptive practices. New approaches for grazing management research must be holistic, straightforward, adaptive, and interactive. Research must be holistic in the sense of recognizing that grazing management is understandable only in relation to the whole ranch enterprise. This is a straightforward procedure if investigations focus on relevant processes at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. It is adaptive and interactive in the sense of viewing grazing management itself as a series of ranch-scale experiments that actively involve ranchers in research design and evaluation. A defi ning characteristic of such approaches will be the quantitative testing, fi rst via simulation and then in the fi eld, testing specifi c hypotheses integrated at the whole-ranch scale. 2009 by the Society for Range Management.
