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...

Soil degradation induced by gully erosion represents a worldwide problem in the many arid and semi-arid countries, such as Iran. This study assessed: (1) importance of variables that control using Boruta algorithm, (2) relationship among causative gullied locations evidential belief function model (EBF), (3) development algorithms boosted regression tree (BRT) support vector machine (SVM). Base...

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 ...

Salvia verbenaca (wild sage) is a commonly cultivated herbal medicine plant, which is native to the Mediterranean climate regions of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. However, it has become an invasive species in semi-arid and arid regions of southern Australia. Two varieties are present in this region, var. verbenaca and var. vernalis, each of which can be distinguished by differences ...

Abstract Russian thistle, also known as tumbleweed ( Salsola spp.), is a problematic invasive plant found on natural and working landscapes. On California rangeland, we tested the singular interactive treatments of grazing, herbicide, seeding to determine how these approaches might influence cover across 5-yr experiment. Total declined by 3% annually during study. A single spring treatment chlo...

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...