Public land management agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), are charged with managing rangelands throughout the western United States for multiple uses, such as livestock grazing and conservation of sensitive species and their habitats.
In the Peruvian highlands, climate change and inadequate management are causing land degradation and collapse of the pastoral system. Our research project was aimed at assessing the impact of grazing on dry Puna ecosystem, as understanding and predicting vegetation changes in harsh environments in the face of different disturbance regimes is required for aware and effective management.
The vegetation of semi‐arid and arid landscapes is often comprised of mixtures of herbaceous and woody vegetation. Since the early 1900s, shifts from herbaceous to woody plant dominance, termed woody plant encroachment and widely regarded as a state change, have occurred world‐wide.
We examined the effect of changes in land use and land tenure on bush encroachment and vegetation condition. An analysis of aerial photographs from three time steps (1949, 1985 and 2004) was used to document changes in woody plant density in different vegetation types on commonage and an adjacent commercial farm in Fort Beaufort, South Africa.
Population growth near protected areas threatens the capacity of such areas for biodiversity conservation. Protected areas may even encourage growth by providing economic benefits that attract migrants. Consequently, understanding the relationships between human demographics and biodiversity is important for conservation.
The only well-studied wintering ground of the globally threatened Aquatic Warbler Acrocephalus paludicola is the ‘Djoudj area’ in Senegal. This study identifies potential Aquatic Warbler habitats within that area and gives an estimate of the size of the local wintering population. A land-cover map was generated by classifying high-resolution satellite images.
Different studies have shown that the effect of land use conversion on soil nutrients and soil organic carbon (SOC) is variable, which indicates that more investigations that focus on different specific geographical locations and land use types are required.
Understanding both the carbon dynamics within Australia’s northern savannas and the opportunities presented through diversification into carbon markets is of relevance to pastoral land managers both in Australia and globally.
Based on remote sensing monitoring, observations and experiments in wind tunnel and field, aeolian processes and landscape change of the Sonid grassland of Inner Mongolia Plateau in northern China were explored in this paper. Aeolian process was very strong and seriously affected by human disturbances on the Sonid grassland of Inner Mongolia Plateau.
Permanently maintained pastures in France are often located in less desirable areas of the country and are extensively used for grass based farming, dairy farming an mountainous regions), and suckler farming (cattle and sheep, down into the valleys). These production systems are of interest because they employ practices respectful of the environment and local biodiversity.
NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission will carry the first combined spaceborne L-band radiometer and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system with the objective of mapping near-surface soil moisture and freeze/thaw state globally every 2-3 days.
Low rainfall, water scarcity and land degradation severely intimidate the production capacities of the rangelands in the arid environments. Water harvesting focuses on improving the productive use of rainwater on the local scale (field to subcatchment scale) before the runoff water leaves the geographical unit in question.