Rangelands, Drylands & Pastoralism

Agistment is the practice of temporarily moving stock between properties, and is used by pastoralists both to strategically develop their enterprises and as a response to environmental heterogeneities such as variation in rainfall. This paper considers the agistment market in the northern Australian rangelands using the 'market failure framework'.

In the last 100 years or so, desertification, degradation, and woody plant encroachment have altered huge tracts of semiarid rangelands. It is expected that the changes thus brought about significantly affect water balance in these regions; and in fact, at the headwater-catchment and smaller scales, such effects are reasonably well documented.

In European mountain areas, shrub encroachment resulting from farmland abandonment is most often managed by mechanical operations such as roller chopping or controlled burning, which have proved to be ineffective and unsustainable. Recent agroecological findings highlight the potential impact of grazing on long-term shrub dynamics.

The objective of this study was to determine the most suitable method (or methods) to improve in the rangelands around Samsun-Turkey rangelands between 1993 and 1999. The 12 management treatments in this study included control, aeration, burning, herbicide application, fertilization, over-sowing, ploughing + resowing and a combination of all the treatments.

The potential of grazing lands to sequester carbon has been investigated in different terrestrial environments but the results are often inconclusive. Our study examined the soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil microbial biomass carbon (MBC) contents inside and outside four grazing exclosures that had been established more than four decades ago in the semi-arid sagebrush steppe of Wyoming.

In order to optimize production, range managers need to understand and manage the spatial distribution of free-ranging herbivores, although this task becomes increasingly difficult as ranching operations diversify to include management of wildlife for recreational hunting.