Rangelands, Drylands & Pastoralism

For over a hundred years the zone of Kisha Beiga, in Burkina Faso, was plagued by ethnic conflicts, revolution and political anarchy. Local rivalries and administrative chaos put paid to any efforts to manage natural resources efficiently. Then, in 1991, the Burkinabe Sahel Programme (PSB) set out to quell factional rivalry and establish sustainable resource-management in the area.

Arid shrub-lands in Syria and elsewhere in West Asia and North Africa are widely thought degraded. Characteristic of these areas is a preponderance of unpalatable shrubs or a lack of overall ground cover with a rise in the associated risks of soil erosion. Migrating pastoralists have been the scapegoats for this condition of the range.

Potential vegetation environments (e.g., habitat types, range sites, ecological sites) are important to land managers because they provide a conceptual basis for the description of resource potentials and ecological integrity.

The objectives of this Colorado study were to assess primary reasons ranchers choose to stay or sell the ranch, compare the motivations for ranching between a traditional agriculturally based county and a rapidly developing county, and assess whether factors such as length of tenure, fiscal dependency on ranching, and dependency on public lands play roles in decisions to sell.

In Utah during the early 1990s it was theorized that substantive change was under way in the management of private grazing land. Change was thought to be spearheaded by grazing permittees who feared losing access to public forage and thus wanted to increase carrying capacity of private grazing land as a hedging tactic.

Aims: The aim is to determine the risk of transmission of BSE to humans and cattle through the application of sewage sludge to agricultural land. Methods and Results: A quantitative risk assessment based on the Source-Pathway-Receptor approach is developed. Central to the model is the estimation of the arithmetic mean concentration of BSE agent in sewage sludge.