Agricultural News
Website Launched to Promote Sustainable Rangeland Management
Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:23:18 CDT
The Rangelands Partnership recently launched a one-stop shop website for all things rangeland. Considering rangelands cover 70 percent of the world's land area, and nearly that percentage for the United States, the information on the site is quite vast.
"The Rangelands Partnership has been working on this website for the last decade. The RangelandsWest website contains the most comprehensive body of information on the world's rangelands relative to any other source," said Karen Hickman, professor at Oklahoma State University's Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management.
The suite of websites (globalrangelands.org) has a database for more than 13,000 resources to support research, sustainable management and education about the world's rangelands. The Rangelands Partnership is a collaboration of 19 western U.S. land-grant institutions and several international organizations, which have been working to develop evaluated, science-based information resources and tools.
"These websites have organized, comprehensive information on all aspects of rangelands, much of it not previously easily available to practitioners or the public, especially those living in remote locations," said George Ruyle, Marley Endowed Chair for Sustainable Rangelands Stewardship at the University of Arizona.
Globalrangelands.org is the home website. The site gives an international perspective on rangeland themes and allows entry to the database containing full-text articles, reports, videos, learning tools and key websites.
The globalrangelands.org/rangelandswest page provides access to the global database as well as western U.S. specific topics. From this page, users can click on a state on an interactive map, which will take them to that state's rangeland page.
The Oklahoma page is filled with information about contemporary rangeland issues such as invasive species, drought and water resources, use of fire in grazing and wildlife management and other rangeland related resources concerning Oklahomans," said Hickman.
"This partnership is experimenting with a new Extension solution for both copy right and no-copy right content delivery by engaging rangeland specialists, librarians and IT specialists to create a one-stop shop to a general public," said Chris Zou, NREM assistant professor.
An annual workshop is held to discuss how to improve the website and its user experience and to exchange ideas among participating institutions. The site is maintained at University of Arizona and each institution will regularly update the content of its own site.
For more information contact Hickman at 405-744-9579 or by email at karen.hickman@okstate.edu or Zou at 405-744-9637 or by email at chris.zou@okstate.edu.
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