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...

Rangeland researchers are increasingly interested in understanding working rangelands as integrated social-ecological systems and in investigating the contexts of human decision-making processes that support system resilience. U.S. public lands ranchers are key partners in rangeland conservation, but the role of women in building system resilience has not yet been explored. We conducted life-hi...

This paper uses a new ecological-economic approach to analyze the role of time in range management in a dynamic and stochastic setting. We first construct a theoretical model of a parcel of rangeland in which time restrictions are used to manage the land. We then show how the dynamic and the stochastic properties of this rangeland can be used to construct two managerial objectives that are ecol...

The timing of application for the management of rangeland grasshoppers (Orthoptera: Acrididae) is critical, especially as insecticides become more specialized and the use of Insect Growth Regulators becomes more widespread. The general seasonal occurrence of adults of many grasshopper species has been well documented; however, their appearance varies widely between years. We analyzed sweep samp...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America R – including grasslands, shrublands, savannas, deserts, prairies, steppe, and tundra – comprise 30–40% of Earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface (depending on one’s definition and data sources; Asner et al. 2004) and account for 91% of the world’s grazing lands (Reid et al. 2008). Encompassing watersheds for vast downstream populatio...