About ORC: Practical Solutions for Rangeland Management

Open Range Consulting comes from the land itself. We aren’t just a GIS company — we’re ranchers and land managers who have spent more than 60 years working rangelands. We know what it takes to keep land productive and healthy at the same time. Our work focuses on practical management that supports both long-term profitability and ecological resilience.

Real Experience:

Our founder, Gregg Simonds, has managed large working ranches, including Desert Land & Livestock and Humboldt. That experience is the foundation of Earth Sensed Technology (EST). It was built to solve real management problems, not just look good on a map.

Our Technology:

With EST, we built tools that are simple to use and actually work in the field. They weren’t designed for the lab or a demo — they were built for day-to-day rangeland management. The approach is patented (U.S. 9,824,276 B2), and the work has been published internationally, reflecting both scientific rigor and practical use.

Diverse Clientele:

EST is used by a wide range of clients — from ranchers and land managers who depend on the land for their livelihoods, to government agencies, universities, the U.S. Department of Defense, and nonprofits. That range matters because the tools have to work in very different settings, and they do.

Our Promise:

Open Range Consulting focuses on solutions that work for both the land and the people managing it. Whether you’re planning long-term use or making day-to-day decisions on large rangelands, our tools are built to make that work clearer and more manageable.

If you’re ready to improve how you understand and manage your land, let’s get to work.

Gregg Simonds

Gregg is the founder and leader of our team, bringing over 40 years of experience in ranch management and conservation across the Western U.S. Since beginning his career in 1974, he served as the manager of Deseret Land and Livestock from 1978 to 1996, where his work was recognized by the U.S. General Accounting Office for excellence in land and wildlife protection. A pioneer in sustainable land management, Gregg has contributed extensively to fire prevention, sage-grouse conservation, and the development of advanced land monitoring methods using remote sensing technologies. His expertise is reflected in numerous publications, including Sailing the Sagebrush Sea and peer-reviewed research on grazing for fuels management and sage-grouse habitat recovery.

Eric Sant

Eric is a co-partner of ORC and serves as the company's GIS, remote sensing, and image data processing specialist, as well as the field collection leader. He oversees all aspects of image acquisition, processing, quality control, and GIS integration to develop products that meet client needs. With a focus on creating geospatial solutions for land management, Eric has pioneered methods for rapidly and accurately assessing rangelands at landscape scales. He has been with ORC since 2001, contributing to numerous federal, state, and private industry projects with innovative remote sensing tools and methods.

Mike Anderson

Mike's experience includes data collections, data analysis and field work in remote areas on ATV’s for Open Range Consulting in Nevada, Montana, Oregon, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, for the last seven eight. Employing and verifying the Piosphere predictive tool to cattle distributions. Creating detailed small resolution maps of riparian systems and their vegetational components. Modeling vegetation function groups across large areas of rangelands in the west. Training and implementation of AIM protocols. Undergraduate research in the BSU soils lab regarding cultivar diversity and litter inputs effect on soil carbon pool accumulations.

Mike’s responsibilities include collecting field data and modeling the vegetation functional groups. He is a crew mechanic and coder for the R statistical software package.  His professional experience includes field work and data collection throughout some of the most remote and rugged corners of many states in the west in rangelands over federal, state, and private working lands. This experience includes training and data collection for implementing AIM plots under the sage grouse habitat assessment framework (HAF). Examining the relationships between predictive and GPS cattle distributions. Riparian mapping in multiple types of stream systems. Designing and implementing sampling protocols to measure and map upland soil carbon pools and their distributions in both riparian and upland rangeland systems.

Wayne Smith

Wayne has worked on a wide variety of wildlife research projects, ranging from amphibians to large mammals. Most of his work has focused on sage-grouse. This has included a graduate research project that studied the response of nesting and brood sage-grouse to grazing livestock. Wayne has contributed to other research projects which have included the effectiveness of translocating sage-grouse, artificial insemination of sage-grouse, and sage-grouse response to juniper removal. His past employers have been the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and Utah State University.

Wayne’s responsibilities include collecting field data and modeling the vegetation functional groups. Wayne is ORC’s wildlife biologist. His responsibilities are to ensure the rest of the crew is calibrated on site selection and vegetation identification. Working with state and federal agencies he has assessed sage-grouse habitat conditions across the western US, allowing ORC to answer a number of habitat concerns for this sensitive species.

Nick Litizzette

Nick has experience working with the Bureau of Reclamation Water quality Upper Colorado Region collecting water samples for quality analyses/assessments on reservoirs. This field work was often done in remote, rugged location using very delicate and expensive equipment. Highly detailed data collection skills were required as well as a strong attention to safety procedures. Nick also has experience working with the U.S. Forest Service on the Uinta/Wasatch/Cache North Zone Trails Crew as a trail crew and wilderness solitude monitoring lead. He was required to spend full days alone in wilderness areas working on trails and conducting solitude monitoring. This work was highly physically strenuous, and at times dangerous. Navigational abilities, data collection abilities, and an attention to detail and safety procedures were all extremely important components of this job.

Nick is a data collection field technician as well as an image processing and GIS analyst. His responsibilities include gear preparation, field image acquisition, image processing, GIS analysis, and report writing. He has been employed with Open Range Consulting since 2021. He has done fieldwork for the company in six states across the west and has experience in image processing, photo classification, modeling, and report writing for various company projects throughout 2021-2024.

Megan Robinson

Megan Robinson is a conservation biologist specializing in movement ecology and wildlife research. She began her career working with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on American pika research as a field technician that then led to a research project on pika for Montana State University (MSU) in Southwest Montana. She also contributed to carnivore conservation research in an MSU lab before earning her bachelor's degree in Conservation Biology and Ecology in 2019.

Following graduation, Megan moved to Zambia to work with the Zambian Carnivore Program, where she gained hands-on experience in large carnivore conservation. She then relocated to Botswana to study African wild dogs with the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust, focusing on phase-specific movement and activity patterns in both resident and dispersing individuals. This work inspired her to pursue a master's degree in Quantitative Environmental Science at the University of Zürich, specializing in movement ecology.

Building on her expertise in ecological research and data analysis, Megan now works with Open Range Consulting, where she applies her skills to rangeland management and conservation.

Grant Simonds

Grant is a seasoned GIS/Field Technician and Media Specialist with a lifetime of experience in the field, having been immersed in the natural environment from the earliest days of his life. Adept in navigating both the wilderness and the digital landscape, Grant brings a unique blend of practical field expertise and creative media sense to his work.

Raised on the front lines of fieldwork, Grant's unconventional education began with his fathers passion, where the fundamentals of GIS, fieldwork, and range management were a part of his upbringing. A testament to his deep-rooted connection with nature, Grant's infancy was spent strapped to an ATV, not just as a passenger, but as the youngest member of an operational crew.

Grant's entrepreneurial spirit manifested early when he launched his first business venture in video production. His ability to tell compelling stories through the lens has been an invaluable asset to the team, enriching their research and outreach.

Beyond his media talents, Grant is Wilderness First Aid certified, ensuring safety and resilience in remote environments. His commitment to his craft is further illustrated by his past as a professional cyclist, a discipline that honed his dedication, endurance, and strategic thinking—traits that are instrumental in his current role.

Jared Shumate

Jared has a broad range of experience in GIS through both his work with Open Range Consulting and his undergraduate education. As a Geography student at the University of Utah, he worked in the Snow Hydrology Lab, using GIS and Python to quantify trends in Utah snowpack from 2000–2023 in support of the Salt Lake 2034 Olympic bid. This project combined his passion for GIS with his career as an Olympic skier, having competed in the 2022 Winter Olympics for Team USA.

At Open Range Consulting, Jared has worked on numerous projects spanning five states across the western United States. His responsibilities include fieldwork, image processing, GIS analysis, and data delivery. He focuses on ensuring that client deliverables are both accurate and accessible through web-based delivery platforms. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Utah and hopes to use his experience with Open Range Consulting to inform land management decisions at the private, state, and federal levels.