Ruminant livestock provides meat and dairy products that sustain health and livelihood for much of the world's population. Grazing lands that support ruminant livestock provide numerous ecosystem services, including provision of food, water, and genetic resources; climate and water regulation; support of soil formation; nutrient cycling; and cultural services. In the U.S. southern Great Plains,...

Svejcar et al. (Environ Manage, 2014) offered several perspectives regarding Beschta et al. (Environ Manage 51:474-491, 2013)--a publication that addressed the interacting ecological effects of climate change and domestic, wild, and feral ungulates on public lands in the western United States (US)--by largely focusing on three livestock grazing issues: (1) legacy versus current day impacts; (2)...

Riparian meadows occupy a small proportion of the public lands in the western United States but they provide numerous ecosystem services, including the production of high-quality forage for livestock grazing. Modern conservation management strategies (e.g., reductions in livestock stocking rates and adoption of new riparian grazing standards) have been implemented to better balance riparian con...

Rangelands are uncultivated lands that include grasslands, savannahs, steppes, shrub lands, deserts and tundra. The native vegetation on rangelands is predominantly grasses, forbs and shrubs (Kothmann, 1974). Rangelands cover 31 percent of the land surface area of the United States (Havstad et al., 2009), and up to half of the land surface area worldwide (Lund, 2007). Most land areas that are n...

Wild burros (Equus asinus), protected by the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act on some federal lands but exotic animals many ecologists and resource mangers view as damaging to native ecosystems, represent one of the most contentious environmental management problems in American Southwest arid lands. This review synthesizes the scattered literature about burro effects on plant communit...

Grazing lands and rangelands are increasingly recognized as an important alternative to other developed land uses for sustaining ecological communities in Florida, the rest of the southeastern United States, and other regions. It is important to understand factors that in uence ecological communities on private grazing lands, especially in areas with abundant wetlands, which are often sensitiv...

sion illustrates the difficulty that current researchers face in obtaining consensus from this generality. More than a century since Charles Darwin stated that diverse Species diversity is a hot topic in grassland ecology regrasslands produce more herbage than monocultures, scientists still search because the reported benefits of biodiversity apdebate the relationship between species diversity ...

The contemporary southwestern United States is characterized by fire-adapted ecosystems; large numbers of federally listed threatened and endangered species; a patchwork of federal, state, and private landownership; and a long history of livestock grazing as the predominant land use. I compared eight sites in southern Arizona and New Mexico to assess the interacting effects of these characteris...

Executive Summary Livestock in Ethiopia has an important economic, functional, and cultural significance. Various functions of livestock include dairy production, meat production, draught labor and transportation. Economically, livestock production accounts for nearly 80% of farmer income 1 in the country. In addition, livestock serves as a “savings account” or a way of building assets. Cultura...