For most ecosystems, net ecosystem exchange of CO2 (NEE) varies within and among years in response to environmental change. We analyzed measurements of CO2 exchange from eight native rangeland ecosystems in the western United States (58 site-years of data) in order to determine the contributions of photosynthetic and respiratory (physiological) components of CO2 exchange to environmentally caus...

Nomadic pastoralism has thrived in Asia’s rangelands for several millennia by tracking seasonal changes in forage productivity and coping with a harsh climate. This pastoralist lifestyle, however, has come under intense transformations in recent decades due to socio-political and land use changes. One example is of the high-altitude trans-Himalayan rangelands of the Jammu and Kashmir State in n...

Soil characteristics and functions are critical determinants of rangeland systems and the ecosystem services that they provide. Rangeland soils are extremely diverse, but an emerging understanding is that paradigms developed in more mesic forest ecosystems may not be applicable. Vascular plants, biological soil crusts, and the soil microbial community are the three major functional groups of or...

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...

In the central Great Plains, pastures and rangelands often are not economically competitive with grain crops. This has led to increases in acreages of row crops at the expense of rangelands, pastures, and hay crops on marginal lands resulting in severe erosion problems. The productivity of forages, pastures, and rangelands needs to be increased to levels that would make them economically compet...

In recent years, a clearer understanding of the complexities of pastoral development has been arising on the basis of work done by African and international researchers and development practitioners. They are refuting the causality of notions normally attributed to pastoralism, such as land mismanagement and degradation. They are also showing how extensive pastoral production has been underesti...