Rangeland health assessment provides qualitative information on ecosystemattributes. We examined changes in rangeland health in the Zagros semi-arid rangelands ofIran at fixed sites between 2001 and 2011, over the 10-year period. The rangelandfragments significantly declines in the quality of the vegetation, and changes in plantspecies were driven largely by seasonality, and to a lesser extent,...

The role of ungulate grazing in shaping rangeland ecosystems is well known relative to other important plant-animal interactions such as pollination, seed dispersal, granivory, and belowground herbivory. Successful rangeland revegetation may be enhanced by strategies that favor certain groups of animals and discourage others. Many perennial forbs and shrubs require animals for successful pollin...

The complexity of natural resource management is increasingly recognized and requires adaptive governance at multiple levels. It is particularly significant to explore the impacts of government interventions on the management practices of local communities and on target social-ecological systems. The Inner Mongolian rangeland was traditionally managed by indigenous people using their own instit...

Conservation policy often incentivizes managers of human-impacted areas to create landscape heterogeneity to maximize biodiversity. In rangeland, patchy disturbance regimes create landscape heterogeneity (patch contrast), but outcomes of heterogeneity-based management are rarely tested for a universal response. We analyzed four habitat variables – vegetation structure, plant functional group co...

People who interact with rangelands on a regular basis gain practical insights about how rangelands work by living on and working with them. This local knowledge is refi ned over time as individuals see the way the land responds to weather, management, and disturbances. Local knowledge (LK) is a type of knowledge “integrally linked with the lives of people, always produced in dynamic interactio...

We investigated experimental warming and simulated grazing (clipping) effects on rangeland quality, as indicated by vegetation production and nutritive quality, in winter-grazed meadows and summer-grazed shrublands on the Tibetan Plateau, a rangeland system experiencing climatic and pastoral land use changes. Warming decreased total aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) by 40 g x m(-2) x ...

The most important decision for successful range management is setting a proper stocking rate. The stocking rate affects rangeland health and productivity, livestock production, and economic returns. Because of its importance, much rangeland research has focused on answering the question, "what is the proper stocking rate?" However, like many important questions in life, it is not easily answer...