Rangelands, Drylands & Pastoralism

Economic motivation for implementing targeted responses to rangeland degradation often lag the events that cause degradation and existing monitoring schemes often lack the sensitivity or the connections to ecological processes to reliably serve as a basis for evaluating success.

In the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma, U.S.A., grazing land is managed predominantly to promote homogeneous grassland structure. This potentially limits the diversity of habitats for grassland obligate songbirds with narrow habitat preferences during the breeding season, prompting ecologists and conservationists to call for managing rangelands for increased heterogeneity.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of existing policies, programmes and legislation in promoting sustainable land management and livelihoods in mid‐central Botswana.

Mechanical and prescribed fire treatments are commonly used to reduce fuel loads and maintain or restore sagebrush steppe rangelands across the Great Basin where pinyon (Pinus) and juniper (Juniperus) trees are encroaching and infilling.

Socio-economic changes threaten nomadic pastoralism across the world, changing traditional grazing patterns. Such land-use changes will co-occur with climate change, and while both are potentially important determinants of future ecosystem functioning, interactions between them remain poorly understood.

In a previous article, Beschta et al. (2013) argue that grazing by large ungulates (both native and domestic) should be eliminated or greatly reduced on western public lands to reduce potential climate change impacts. The authors were selective in their use of the scientific literature, and their publication is more of an opinion article than a synthesis.

Latin American subtropical dry ecosystems have experienced significant human impact for more than a century, mainly in the form of extensive livestock grazing, forest products extraction, and agriculture expansion.

The arctic forest-tundra ecotone (FTE) represents a major transition zone between contrasting ecosystems, which can be strongly affected by climatic and biotic factors. Expected northward expansion and encroachment on arctic tundra in response to climate warming may be counteracted by natural and anthropogenic processes such as defoliating insect outbreaks and grazing/browsing regimes.

We studied nest site land cover associations, and reproductive success of two Buteo species of conservation concern on the southern Great Plains, USA. The study area was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, where land use is dominated by row crop agriculture, livestock grazing, and Conservation Reserve Program grasslands. Ferruginous Hawks (B.

The impacts of domesticated herbivores on ecosystems that did not evolve with mammalian grazing can profoundly influence community composition and trophic interactions. Also, such impacts can occur over long time frames by altering successional vegetation trajectories.

Understanding how vegetation composition varies with season and interannual climate variability is important for any ecological research that uses vegetation data derived from surveys for the basis of inference. Misunderstanding this variation can influence land management and planning decisions, leading to poor implementation of biodiversity offsetting mechanisms, for example.

Land abandonment is a major issue worldwide. In Argentina, the Monte Desert is the most arid rangeland, where the traditional conservation practices are based on successional management of areas excluded to disturbances or abandoned. Some areas subjected to this kind of management may be too degraded, and thus require active restoration.