Cattle with collars for virtual fencing research by Oregon State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service.
Credit: Morgan Lawrence.
The use of virtual fencing to manage cattle grazing on sagebrush rangelands has the potential to create fuel breaks needed to help fight wildfires, a recent Oregon State University and U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service study found.
Virtual fencing involves placing collars on livestock. The collars communicate with GPS and reception towers to form a virtual fence set by the rancher. Auditory stimuli emit from the collar when the livestock reach the limit of the virtual fence and they receive a benign shock if they pass the fence limit.
"We're seeing the challenge related to wildfires that land managers, particularly on public lands, are facing in the western U.S.," said David Bohnert, director of Oregon State's Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Burns. "They just don't have the tools to manage those public lands in a way that is timely, particularly related to wildfire. This new study should help begin to change that."
Wildfires on sagebrush landscapes, which cover much of the interior landscape of the western U.S., have increased dramatically in recent years, with more acres burning, the size of fires increasing and more federal dollars being spent to fight fires, USDA statistics show.
These changes are in part due to the expansion of nonnative annual grasses on the sagebrush landscape, the researchers note. The increased prevalence of these nonnative grasses, which dry out earlier in the growing season and grow faster than native perennial bunchgrass, leads to an increase in fuel for wildfires.
Most methods to reduce fuel for wildfires have focused on cutting or burning shrubs or trees. Recently there have been efforts to strategically place a network of fuel breaks across sagebrush landscapes to provide space where firefighters can safely seek to contain the spread of fires.
The new study from Oregon State and Agricultural Research Service scientists, published in Rangeland Ecology & Management, looked at whether cattle grazing and virtual fencing could be an effective tool to create those fuel breaks by eating the grass that fuels fires.
Virtual fencing has been around for decades, but in recent years, with advances in satellite, battery and GPS technology, it has gained more attention in the agricultural community, Bohnert said. It allows ranchers to control livestock distribution in rangeland landscapes without physical fences, which are costly to construct and maintain and also may be harmful to wildlife.
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