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What Brings Us Together: Five Lessons from the Range
Field Notes What Brings Us Together: Five Lessons from the Range By Brenda Richards, Idaho Rangeland Conservation Partnership Coordinator Conserving and restoring healthy rangelands is a community-scale effort that depends on people in many roles, from restoration crews and wildland firefighters to land managers, permit specialists, agency staff, and landowners. One of the most vital—and…
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Video: Sustaining Wetlands & Watersheds with Flood-Irrigated Grass Hay
Riparian corridors are lifelines for the wildlife and communities of the Intermountain West. These corridors are home to many of the region’s wetlands and are sustained by seasonal water cycles. This means that the wildlife that depends on wetlands, from migratory waterbirds to big game animals, can often be found using riparian areas. Much of…
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Buoying the Bear River with Irrigation Infrastructure Funding
Strategic Funding Pools allow NRCS to provide locally focused conservation that benefits producers and wildlife. Standing in a couple of inches of water down in the floodplain of the Bear River, Ben Weston surveyed one of his hay fields. Tall green grasses reach up to his waist, bowing in the gusts created by a hot…
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Restoring the Ravine with the Environmental Quality Incentives Program
EQIP makes applying low-tech process-based restoration practices like beaver dam analogs an approachable solution for Utah landowners. It’s a hot July mid-afternoon, and Kent Baker is down in the weeds. Some of them are noxious, and those he’s working to eradicate, but many are native—grasses and sedges, tiny saplings of shrubs like chokecherry and fernbush.…
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New Collaboration Opportunities with Idaho Cattle Association
The June issue of Idaho Cattle Association’s Line Rider magazine included an announcement about new opportunities with the IWJV to improve producer access to Natural Resources Conservation Service programs. See this article on page 28 of the June 2024 issue.
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A River of Elk Flows Through Heaven
Scroll to view this StoryMap article, or see it full size here.View a video version below. VIDEO: A River of Elk Flows Through Heaven
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Science Q&A: Flood Irrigation and Groundwater Recharge
Water is the West’s most precious resource, and yet there is so much we don’t know about it. How are groundwater supplies and aquifers—as well as rivers and streams—affected by return flows from surrounding wetlands and agricultural fields? What happens to irrigation water after it helps grow crops and forage for livestock? Moreover, how do…
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A Look at the Montana Groundwater Investigation Program
Q&A with Jenna Dohman, Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology Hydrogeologist Jenna Dohman’s work with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology’s Montana Ground Water Investigation Program includes a groundwater monitoring project on the Big Hole River, where most private land agricultural irrigation involves flood-irrigating grass hay. Dohman is measuring surface water at 16 sites…
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Learning more about how irrigation intensification impacts sustainability of streamflow in the Western United States
A Q&A with David Ketchum, USGS remote sensing and geospatial information specialist David Ketchum’s research with the University of Montana, Irrigation intensification impacts sustainability of streamflow in the Western United States, looks into the relationship between irrigation intensification and in-stream flows in watersheds across the western United States. As climate-change-induced drought impacts water availability for…
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Rising to the Challenge: 2024 Agricultural Land Easement Workshop
In January 2024, the Intermountain West Joint Venture (IWJV) and the University of Wyoming’s Ruckelshaus Institute built off of a successful 2023 ACEP-ALE workshop to jointly host the 2024 Agricultural Land Easement Workshop. This workshop provided a forum to collaboratively identify specific strategies to increase the pace and scale of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service…
