In the last three decades, the Borana rangelands of Southern Ethiopia have been deteriorating due to unsustainable utilization. This paper analyses the changes in indigenous range management among the Borana pastoralists and the role of development interventions.The fieldwork was carried out during 2000-2002, following a severe drought. Two locations, Dida Hara and Web, that once were part of a large grazing system with seasonally distinct herd movements, experienced differences in development interventions.

We describe the results of a survey of farmers’ perceptions of and satisfaction with the performance of watershed development activities on socioeconomic, agriculture and livestock, and environmental attributes. We administered a questionnaire to 120 farmers randomly interviewed in the Morni Hill area of the Siwalik Himalayas in India. Our results show that the farmers have considerable knowledge about the implementation of watershed development activities and their impact on the economy, agriculture and the environment.

Latin American subtropical dry ecosystems have experienced significant human impact for more than a century, mainly in the form of extensive livestock grazing, forest products extraction, and agriculture expansion. We assessed the regional-scale effect of land use and land cover (LULC) on patterns of richness distribution of trees, birds, amphibians, and mammals in the Northern Argentine Dry Chaco (NADC) over c. 19 million hectares. Using species distribution models in a hierarchical framework, we modeled the distributions of 138 species.

The arctic forest-tundra ecotone (FTE) represents a major transition zone between contrasting ecosystems, which can be strongly affected by climatic and biotic factors. Expected northward expansion and encroachment on arctic tundra in response to climate warming may be counteracted by natural and anthropogenic processes such as defoliating insect outbreaks and grazing/browsing regimes.

Degraded lands are common in human-influenced tropical semiarid areas, and the potential for C sequestration through rehabilitation of these areas is substantial. In this study, we investigated changes in ecosystem C stocks (ECS) after establishing exclosures on degraded communal grazing lands, and identified easily measurable biophysical and management-related factors that can be used to predict ECS restoration in the highlands of Tigray, Ethiopia. We selected replicated (n = 3) 5-, 10-, 15-, and 20-yr-old exclosures and paired each exclosure with an adjacent communal grazing land.

We studied nest site land cover associations, and reproductive success of two Buteo species of conservation concern on the southern Great Plains, USA. The study area was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, where land use is dominated by row crop agriculture, livestock grazing, and Conservation Reserve Program grasslands. Ferruginous Hawks (B. regalis) were uncommon and nested primarily in and around the Rita Blanca National Grassland (NG). Swainson’s Hawks (B. swainsoni) were common and nested throughout the study area.

The impacts of domesticated herbivores on ecosystems that did not evolve with mammalian grazing can profoundly influence community composition and trophic interactions. Also, such impacts can occur over long time frames by altering successional vegetation trajectories. Removal of domesticated herbivores to protect native biota can therefore lead to unexpected consequences at multiple trophic levels for native and non-native species.

Over the last 20 years, a change in traditional land use practices has taken place in central Germany. Formerly species-rich dry grassland communities have been converted into communities with greatly reduced diversity in many places. Whereas grass species have expanded, several forbs have declined in abundance. For the present study, plant–plant interactions were assessed between the expanding grass Festuca rupicola and the forb Dianthus carthusianorum – two typical, companion grassland species – to ascertain any associated effects of land use change.

Understanding how vegetation composition varies with season and interannual climate variability is important for any ecological research that uses vegetation data derived from surveys for the basis of inference. Misunderstanding this variation can influence land management and planning decisions, leading to poor implementation of biodiversity offsetting mechanisms, for example. We monitored plots (400 m²) grazed by livestock paired with adjacent ungrazed plots in derived native pastures four times a year over 2.5 years on the North‐West Slopes of New South Wales.

Overgrazing is a primary agent to cause and aggravate desertification in the Horqin Sandy Grassland of northern China that has reduced the capacity of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) storage in the region. Grazing exclosure practice is recommended to control the desertification by vegetation restoration. How the restoration improves the C and N storage needs to be answered to the policy makers for their future land use planning and decisions.

Spatial dynamics of carbon fluxes in dryland montane ecosystems are complicated and may be influenced by topographic conditions and land tenure. Here we employ a modified version of the Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach (CASA) ecosystem model to estimate annual net primary production (NPP) at a fine spatial resolution (30m) in pinyon–juniper (P–J) woodlands of the Colorado Plateau. NPP estimated by CASA was generally comparable to validation data from a statistical NPP model and field observations.

Land abandonment is a major issue worldwide. In Argentina, the Monte Desert is the most arid rangeland, where the traditional conservation practices are based on successional management of areas excluded to disturbances or abandoned. Some areas subjected to this kind of management may be too degraded, and thus require active restoration. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess whether passive succession-based management is a suitable approach by evaluating the status of land degradation in a protected area after 17–41� years of farming abandonment.