By Lael Gilbert ’01

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Scarlet Globemallow. Winterfat. Deathcamas. Coyote melon. Showy goldeneye. 

These aren’t names of hard-rock bands, though maybe they should be. They are, however, a few of the thousands of native plants found growing on the vast, underappreciated space tucked between Utah’s ski slopes and red rock canyons — rangelands.

These are places where you can see from horizon to horizon, where sun warms miniscule, gray-green leaves of sagebrush, raising the subtle scent of pine and mesquite. Where sounds of wildlife come from far off — the scritchy call of a scrub-jay, the insistent hum of cicada, the clumsy flutter of sage-grouse hidden under the cover of low brush. 

Rangelands make up more than 80% of Utah and provide habitat for an extraordinary array of wildlife. Nationally, about 84% of mammal species are associated with rangeland ecosystems during at least part of the year. Yet many people still have just a vague notion of what, and where they are. 

They tend to be fairly dry, right? With deer and antelope … playing? 

Perhaps the gap in knowledge can be excused, says Eric Thacker, rangeland Extension specialist from the Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Even for scientists like him, it’s often easier to describe what these diverse desert landscapes are not, rather than what they are. They don’t include dense forests, plowed, irrigated farmlands, or completely barren places like sand dunes. Everything else, most of Utah and half of the land in the West (and the world), falls into the category of rangeland. 

Often underappreciated, those areas are the working backbone of the U.S. and should be celebrated — especially since this is the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (livestock farmers) — even if they don’t get Instagrammed as much as Utah’s national parks. 

But those who live and work in the rural West don’t need convincing. They already know what these landscapes do: feed livestock, sustain rural economies, shelter wildlife, and provide clean water and energy while quietly keeping natural systems functioning. 

“Rangelands are working lands. Not just for livestock, but for how our world operates,” Thacker explains. “And our understanding of them has changed almost as much as they have over the years.”

The early West gave these lands a complex history. For thousands of years, Native peoples depended on rangelands for food, travel, and culture, shaping it through long use. Later, Euro-American settlement brought a different approach. Settlers sought parcels with access to water — desirable tracts were adjacent to springs, rivers and streams. The rest wasn’t the kind of land you’d pay $1.25 an acre for. No one claimed it, but everyone grazed it. 

Prior to the 1930s, ranchers had little incentive to limit the size or spread of herds. Overgrazing reduced native plants and led to widespread soil erosion. Historical accounts from the early 1900s often describe Utah, along with much of the West, as “depleted.” 

“Places like Utah and Texas were on the brink of disaster,” Thacker says. “Grasses were grazed faster than they could recover, and in many places the deep-rooted native plants that held soil in place were becoming sparse. Topsoil washed away, and some areas lost their ability to grow plants.”

Open range gradually gave way to fenced land and barbed wire, while federal legislation eventually brought grazing on public lands under a system of permits and management intended to protect the land from overuse. Since then, range conditions have generally improved. Land managers now aim to match the number of grazing animals to what the land can support. Agencies like the BLM and Forest Service monitor the land to prevent it from being overused. Researchers at USU and other institutions have developed better ways to understand how grasses, soils, and water respond to grazing, leading to practices such as rotational grazing and active restoration. 

Today’s management perspective holds both the practical, the future, and the worst-case scenario of the past in perspective, explains Brant Hallows, a USU range program alum and a longtime land manager in the Richfield, Utah field office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

“These places aren’t static, and still face challenges,” Hallows says. “They’ve changed incredibly, even in recent history, and continue to. Some people say we should just let mother nature do the work, but there are plenty of natural things we do not want happening here, these forces have to be managed.”

Land managers and researchers began to recognize dry landscapes didn’t respond to changes in simple, predictable ways. The ecology of rangelands is complex, slow and unique. Though early management efforts were mostly livestock-centric, they’ve expanded over time to be more holistic, recognizing the complexity of each of these ecosystems.

“We’ve learned a lot about how grazing interacts with plant communities, soil processes, water cycles, and animal behavior,” Thacker says. “Desert ecosystems operate at slow rates, and change has to be monitored carefully over time. We’re looking for long-term stability within the context these ecosystems operate — decades, and longer.”

That knowledge becomes especially important when a landscape has been disturbed. Roads, mines, pipelines, wildfire, and invasive weeds can all leave behind bare ground where native plants may be slow to return. Restoring these places isn’t as simple as scattering seeds and waiting for rain.

That’s where researchers like Kari Veblen come in. Her work at Utah State focuses on understanding why restoration succeeds in some places and fails in others, studying how native grasses and shrubs establish, how invasive species compete, and how managers can tip the odds in favor of healthy plant communities through plant restoration and grazing management. These answers help land managers decide when to seed, what to plant, and where limited restoration dollars will have the greatest impact.

Rangeland research helps provide the foundation for land management across the West. Clint Wirick took his USU rangeland education to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where he works with ranchers who want to improve the public and private lands they use for grazing. He helps build healthier landscapes for threatened and endangered species, and other species at risk, and ends up benefiting multiple species of animals, plants, fish and insects — as well as humans — in the process.

Grazing is now understood to be a force like wildfire and drought — a factor for change on a much-changed landscape — that can either be part of a healthy ecosystem or push it over the edge.

The Bureau of Land Management is the federal agency with oversight for much of the rangeland in the West, including almost 23 million acres in Utah. The rest is managed by the Forest Service, the state, tribes, and private landowners. Hallows, Wirick, and hundreds of professionals like them manage these competing uses and ecological pressures with weed management, grazing permits, active restoration and prescribed fire. 

Although federal agencies oversee public rangelands in Utah, the managers themselves are often professionals with a Utah education, including from USU’s natural resource programs like Hallows and Wirick. They draw on science done at Utah State to improve the land. With a complex history and tangled ecology, it takes expertise to understand how to best do this. Rather than relying on intuition alone, today’s managers can draw on decades of research to make decisions to balance competing interests.

Rangelands do a lot of invisible work too, says Wirick. They store huge amounts of carbon underground, filter water, replenish aquifers, regulate streamflow, and promote pollinator diversity for healthier plants beyond their borders. He has learned the importance of supporting the people who live on and responsibly care for these natural spaces to keep these processes strong.

“Ranchers do everyone a service,” Wirick says. “My goal is to keep them profitable and on the land, as well as their kids and grandkids, and the only way to do that is to run a sustainable, smart operation to keep things in balance for the long term. These kinds of things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.” 

Like the lands they manage, BLM management has changed over time too. The mandate of “multiple use and sustained yield” was originally dominated by livestock grazing, but now includes mandates for renewable energy, minerals, water, and conservation. It’s not always easy to find the center of that many-pronged pendulum. And not the least of the challenges is people often don’t know when they are standing on BLM land, explains Hallows. 

And more and more people are standing on it. Recreation is becoming an increasingly important use of rangelands. Hiking has increased significantly in the last decades. Off-highway vehicles, birding, and mountain biking are increasing at steady rates. Fishing and hunting have long attracted huge numbers of passionate, invested users. 

The biggest challenge rangelands face today, according to Wirick, is getting people to see it for what it offers, and to care about it for the future — to pay enough attention to understand how much we rely on these complex systems.

His advice: Look up.

“Take a look outside your car window the next time you visit rangelands,” he says.