![]() ![]() In one sense, the rancher is “gaming” the environment, he said. If a rancher believes it is going to be dry again the following summer, it will affect decisions in the current year. “But what if it is dry again next year? That is the big unknown.”įarmers, ranchers, and water managers are always thinking about next year, Travis said. “If it is a dry year and the rancher has 400 head of cattle, he might know that if he is careful, he can graze them enough to get them to market weight and break even that first dry year,” Travis said. Although cattle need healthy grass to feed on, ranchers are often thinking about the bigger picture, he said. The immediate weather isn’t the only factor that plays in to whether a rancher will sell his cattle, Travis said. Suddenly, the study went “live” as ranchers nationwide faced the same stark decisions that the CSTPR team were investigating. Opportunely-solely for the research study-when the scientists were halfway through one cycle of analysis, a severe drought hit the entire nation. “Ranchers can take actions to reduce the impacts of drought but can’t reduce risks to zero,” Travis said. Various factors feed into how ranchers might react to drought, from the health of grazing pastures and the long-term weather forecast to the price per head of cattle and what neighboring ranchers are doing, Travis said. “All the families we interviewed remembered it in detail and were able to talk about the decisions they made.” “That particular year was remarkable,” Travis said. This area-the “three corners”-was the heart of the 2002 drought-one of the driest years in the interior West. To model the ranchers’ thought processes in hot, dry summers, CSTPR graduate student Kristen Gangwer visited some 20 ranchers in the region where Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah meet. Then, they model how these choices turn out given alternative weather and climate scenarios. The team conducts their research by first interviewing the decision makers and building lists of the choices available to them. ![]() “We’re studying how people make decisions under environmental uncertainty,” Travis said, “both to better understand human behavior and also to see if we can help people make better decisions when they get weather or climate information.” Travis and his colleagues have investigated the choices facing-and subsequently made-by ranchers and farmers in drought conditions and water managers in both drought and stormy conditions. “But similarities in how they make decisions under uncertainty allow us to look for patterns.” “Each party faces some unique challenges-they could be dealing with drought, flood, or extremes of heat and cold,” said Bill Travis, director of the CIRES Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR). Something else too: They are also all studied by CIRES researchers trying to decipher how people can best respond to changes in climate. Ranchers, farmers, water managers, even local road engineers, all have something in common: They make decisions subject to the vagaries of weather and climate. ![]()
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