Geo-Fencing Summit

Background: Geo-fencing provides some unique advantages over conventional fencing approaches. This is especially true when we consider the devastation to fencing, and other rangeland infrastructure, caused by wildfires. Geo-fencing is increasingly used with public land grazing leases, but the cost-effectiveness of geo-fencing and common challenges are not well understood. Issues such as cost-effectiveness, environmental concerns, animal welfare, and system efficacy remain unclear.

In this Summit, we provide a forum for producers, managers, and USDA Forest Service agency leadership to share their insights, successes, and failures while answering questions in the process. Geo-fencing may have a significant role to play in the future of public land management. In this Summit, we provide a backdrop against which we can come to some common understanding of what the technology affords including the considerations needed prior to implementation.

Summit Scope & Components: The objective is to enable Summit participants to learn from the real-world experience provided by managers, agency leaders, and producers. In this Summit, we discuss geo-fencing through a series of coupled 20-minute presentations followed by a 30-minute live question-and-answer session. In this manner, we aim to engage participants from a wide range of experiences and disciplines.

Deliverables & Benefits:

• The meeting itself. It provides an important means of information exchange where we can all learn from each other.
• Recorded 20-minute presentations that can be revisited remotely anytime.
• Identification of new partnerships between producers, managers, and researchers to foster more effective land management strategies to be developed across more regions.