When I visited Oxbow Cattle Company in Montana last spring, I saw firsthand how land management practices can support healthy grasslands and productive working lands. Owners Bart and Wendy Morris and their team are helping regenerate creeks and riparian areas, supporting soil carbon storage and nutrient cycling, and reestablishing native plants and insects like dung beetles. Certified as bird-friendly land through the Audubon Conservation Ranching program, the ranch also provides habitat for birds, including the Bald Eagles that we saw flying overhead.
Oxbow Cattle Company is one example of how healthy grasslands can provide critical bird habitat, store carbon, and deliver other benefits, including improved water quality, soil health, resilience, and agricultural productivity. Audubon works to ensure that grasslands and other key ecosystems are managed in ways that protect and enhance nature’s capacity to store carbon and reduce emissions. These conservation actions, known as natural climate solutions, are essential to addressing both climate change and biodiversity loss.
Audubon has already identified where to act. Our 2021 Natural Climate Solutions Report identified priority places for protection, improved management, and restoration. Subsequent research published in Scientific Reports identified places where conservation could benefit birds, carbon, and communities. Our new brief, Managing U.S. Grasslands for Birds, Carbon, and Co-benefits, builds on that foundation by evaluating common grassland management practices and the evidence for their outcomes.
The brief examines eight practices for their effects on grassland birds, carbon storage and sequestration, and environmental and social co-benefits. Four practices emerge as the most reliable “triple wins”: adaptive grazing, protecting wetlands from grazing, controlling invasive plant species, and planting native species. These practices show consistent evidence of benefits for birds, carbon, and broader grassland resilience.
That said, there is no one-size-fits-all prescription for grasslands. Outcomes, particularly for grassland birds, depend on the species, landscape, timing, intensity, and other local conditions. The brief is a synthesis of the evidence, not a prescriptive playbook, and should be paired with local knowledge, ecological conditions, monitoring, and land manager goals. Adaptive management and monitoring are essential parts of implementation.
Download the Grasslands Management Brief
This work is important for grasslands, where there is an urgent need to put science into practice. Grassland birds like the Western Meadowlark are experiencing the steepest decline of any U.S. avian group, driven largely by habitat loss, degradation, and climate change. Better understanding how management affects both birds and carbon can support more intentional, outcome-oriented conservation across Central and Western U.S. grasslands and rangelands.
For Audubon, this brief provides a science-based framework for connecting bird conservation, climate, policy, and working lands efforts. Many of the practices evaluated align with Audubon Conservation Ranching and its approach to enhancing grassland ecosystems while supporting agricultural productivity through the Bird-Friendly Land Certification.
We also hope conservation practitioners and land stewards find this resource useful for adaptive management strategies, habitat management plans, regional roadmaps, and conversations with producers. Policymakers, funders, and conservation investors can use the findings to help direct public and private resources toward practices with strong evidence of multiple benefits, while retaining flexibility for local conditions and supporting producer-led solutions, monitoring, technical assistance, and research.
Additional briefs will build on this work by evaluating management practices across different ecosystems like forests and coasts. By connecting climate science with management outcomes, we can work together to support approaches that most reliably deliver climate, biodiversity, and community benefits.
