Rangelands of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau (QTP), although sparsely populated and contributing little to China’s overall economy, play an important environmental role throughout Asia. They contain high biodiversity values and can also potentially provide China with a source of cultural and geographic variety in the future. Chinese government reports paint a gloomy picture, considering vast porti...

Extensive livestock grazing even in unsuitable land has increasingly grown in most parts of semi-arid rangeland. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to identify suitable land for livestock grazing for optimum utilization while causing minimum impact to the environment. This paper adapted the schematic model based on the concepts presented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of suitabi...

In this study, a land use/land cover change analysis method was developed to examine patterns of land use/land cover conversions of cropland to urban uses and conversions of rangeland to cropland uses in the United States (US) Midwest region. We used the US 2001 and 2006 National Land Cover Datasets (NLCD) for our spatial analyses of these conversion trends. Our analysis showed that the eastern...

CARMA (CAse-based Range Management Adviser) is a system that integrates case-based reasoning with model-based reasoning for rangeland pest management. CARMA’s predictions of rangeland forage loss by grasshoppers were compared to predictions by 15 expert entomologists using either global or case-specific adaptation weights. Under both conditions, CARMA’s predictions were more accurate than CARMA...

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the sustainability of rangeland management. We show that a rain-index insurance with frequent payoffs, i....