COLORADO—The Rocky Mountain Research Station will kick off the 2022 rangeland growing season by offering a new season of Reading the Tea Leaves Webcast—The Great Reversal, set to begin on March 1, 2022. This webcast looks to serve all rangeland managers and fire and fuel professionals across agencies and management organizations.

When monitoring rangeland conditions, every year is different. The weather is consistently dynamic throughout the growing season, and keeping up with these yearly changes takes effort. Matt Reeves, RMRS research ecologist, along with the RMRS science delivery group, created A West-wide Rangeland Fuel Assessment: Reading the Tea Leaves, a monthly webcast to share projections of expected fuel conditions during this year’s grazing and fire seasons. Reeves bases the in-season projections on Fuelcast, a new tool offering fuel and forage projections beginning four months ahead of peak green conditions.

Reeves distills all this information into a seven minutes or less “what you need to know” webcast each month, during which he chooses which hat to wear while painting the picture of past and future conditions. Reeves says, “We have learned our lesson from 2021, and we have updated Fuelcast to capture it. RTTL is committed to keeping managers informed about rapidly developing conditions.”

Reeves resides in Missoula, Montana, and specializes in remote sensing and ecological modeling, focusing exclusively on rangeland issues. He is motivated to provide land managers tangible, accessible science and welcomes feedback on ways to improve the Reading the Tea Leaves webcast.

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