Building partnerships on Idaho’s rangelands

Lane Justus (Master of Environmental Management, 2026) works to reduce carnivore-livestock conflict on Idaho rangelands.

Idaho is one of several states with more cows than people. It also hosts the second largest wolf population in the contiguous United States, since their reintroduction by federal conservationists in 1995.

These two statistics represent opposite sides of Idaho's wilderness coin: land use for agriculture and conservation of wild lands. Both sides are important to Idahoans, but what do you do when they come into conflict?

That is what Lane Justus (Master of Environmental Management, 2026) spent the summer of 2026 exploring. With support from the PLACE Scholars Internship program in Boise State's School of the Environment, Justus worked as a visiting researcher within the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, Wildlife Services National Wildlife Research Center.

Justus facilitated conversations to support new research projects alongside landowners and agency staff to understand existing carnivore-livestock interaction and support deployment of resources to reduce conflict in the future.

Justus and participating stakeholders hope to see this information mitigate future carnivore-livestock conflicts and support relationship building between partners in this space.

A history of conflict between wolves, cattle

Justus, who has prior work experience as a biologist, knows how environmental concerns and agricultural realities can lock horns. "Producers in this area have historically had quite a bit of conflict with wolves and their cattle," she said.

That includes direct conflict, when wolves kill or injure livestock, and forms of indirect conflict that are frequently overlooked. "Weight changes, behavioral shifts, the cost of going out to find depredations… There are a lot of factors that play a role in the economics of carnivore conflict with cattle."

Conflicts have a real impact on the livelihoods of ranchers, whose cattle graze on private, state and federal lands throughout Idaho, which relies on agriculture for 17% of its economy. To protect their herds, ranchers often rely on lethal control - killing wolves that come into conflict with their herds.

"But with new technology," Justus said, "we have the opportunity to learn about how we might deploy other resources to reduce ongoing and future conflicts."

Using GPS, trail cameras to study wolf-cattle interactions

Trail cameras like this can track carnivore and livestock movements, stopping conflict before it happens.

While working with ranchers to deploy new virtual fencing technology in post-fire landscapes at her full-time job with the Western Landowners Alliance, Justus began to notice how the technology might be used to address additional resource concerns. She reached out to researchers at the USDA APHIS Wildlife Services National Wildlife Research Center and pitched the idea.

"With virtual fencing, we're able to build invisible fences without having physical barriers across the landscape," Justus said. "And in addition to those invisible barriers, the cattle collars are also collecting GPS data on where and how livestock are moving throughout allotments."

Virtual fencing, while a relatively new technology, is starting to gain traction across the West. The technology being deployed in Justus' projects use cellular towers that connect to individual GPS-enabled collars worn by cows. Ranchers are able to draw fence lines on the computer or their mobile devices and those fences are downloaded onto the collars. Auditory cues and mild shocks from the collars keep livestock inside those boundaries.

"As I was sitting down with the ranchers and discussing what was important for them to get out of this virtual fencing project, there were lots of questions that came up about using the GPS information to understand carnivore impacts and don't-come-home rates more broadly," Justus explained. "We've never had this many cows in one area collared with the ability to create fences and have specific GPS-locations we can go check. This new tool is giving us all kinds of information to help better understand what is going on on the landscape."

Using both wolf and cattle GPS-locations, depredation data and ground-truthing, Justus' project will quantify frequency, duration, timing, intensity and spatial patterns of interactions. The work also seeks to understand cattle behavioral responses to disturbances experienced during the grazing season (shifts in cattle movements, distribution, herd cohesion, etc.).

Starting conversations

Making virtual fencing work within the carnivore-livestock conflict mitigation realm involves bringing together ranchers, agencies and research stakeholders to understand ongoing conflicts and create solutions that actually work for both ranching operations and the landscape.

In documenting this information, Justus and fellow researchers hope that virtual fencing can be used as a tool to mitigate future conflict through conflict reduction grazing strategies, avoidance of common conflict zones, and knowledge of when and where to deploy additional conflict reduction resources.

As a Boise State PLACE Scholar, Justus is facilitating conversations between ranchers and federal agencies. All to understand behavioral interactions across the landscape, serving to reduce carnivore-livestock conflict and improve conditions for both livestock and wolves.

These conversations give both sides a chance to share concerns and find solutions in a productive way.

"We want it to be led by ranchers," Justus said. "We want them to control how this moves forward, so that they can trust the results and it benefits them."

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