Woody plant encroachment—the conversion of grasslands to woodlands—continues to transform rangelands worldwide, yet its causes and consequences remain poorly understood. Despite this being a coupled human-ecological phenomenon, research to date has tended toward ecological aspects of the issue. In this paper, we provide new insight into the long-term relationships between human demographics and woody plant cover at the landscape scale.

In China, three major rangeland management policies have caused dramatic social, economic, and ecological changes for pastoral regions in the past 30 yr: the Rangeland Household Contract Policy (RHCP), Rangeland Ecological Construction Projects (RECPs), and the Nomad Settlement Policy (NSP). The impacts of these policies are greatly debated. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of academic perspectives on the impacts of the three policies and the causes of ineffective and negative effects.

Long-term agricultural sustainability and water quality may be threatened by inadequate land management. Carbon (C) losses at the catchment scale largely depend on land use and management practices. In “Abelar” farm (A Coruña, NW Spain), swine slurry was directly discharged during a period of about 30 years onto agricultural maize fields and rangeland under cattle production. In 1998, the agricultural fields and rangeland were planted to stands of Eucalyptus globulus .

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Grazing lands worldwide are increasingly subjected to intensification to meet global demand for food; however, management practices intended to increase production can also affect ecosystem carbon (C) stocks. This study evaluated long-term (>22 years) ecosystem C responses to conversion of native grazing lands into more intensively managed silvopasture and sown pastures. METHODS: Above- and below-ground C pools in each land use type were evaluated.

The objectives of this Colorado study were to assess primary reasons ranchers choose to stay or sell the ranch, compare the motivations for ranching between a traditional agriculturally based county and a rapidly developing county, and assess whether factors such as length of tenure, fiscal dependency on ranching, and dependency on public lands play roles in decisions to sell. Personal interviews were conducted with 37 ranchers. While land use conversion occurs for a wide variety of reasons, lack of heirs and detrimental public policy were important reasons given for selling ranches.

Inappropriate land use and soil mismanagement produced wide-scale soil and environmental degradation to the short-grass steppe ecosystem in the semiarid region of central east Kazakhstan. A limitation for determining the impacts of land use changes on soil organic carbon (SOC) is the dearth of information on SOC stocks under the predominant land uses in the region.

Employing rangelands for climate change mitigation is hindered by conflicting reports on the direction and magnitude of change in soil organic carbon (ΔSOC) following changes in woody cover. Publications on woody thickening and deforestation, which had led to uncertainty in ΔSOC, were re-evaluated, and the dimensional-dependence of their data was determined. To model the fundamentals of SOC flux, linked SOC pools were simulated with first-order kinetics. Influences from forest development timelines and location of mature trees, with a potential for deep-set roots, were considered.

The Mediterranean region covers about 854 million ha, but only 118 million (or 14 per cent) are suitable for agricultural production. In North Africa and the Middle East (MENA), agricultural land covers about 5 per cent; in Egypt and Algeria, it occupies less than 4 per cent and, in Libya, less than 2 per cent of the total national land area. Across the Mediterranean region land use divides between natural pastures/rangelands (ca. 15 per cent), forests and woodlands (ca. 8 per cent), with the ca.

This article reports on a survey of ranch owners in high amenity areas in southwestern Montana that have experienced marked ownership change over the last two decades. Specifically, we focus on findings from a set of questions targeting water resource and riparian area management. After reviewing the results, we consider how new owners may be managing water resources differently than longtime owners and what the ecological implications of this shift in management might be for Montana's prized wild fisheries.

For some fifteen years, dairy cattle farming has been considerably developing in various parts of the Andes. Milk is transformed into cheese or sold fresh, giving rural families a regular income which secures their food supply. The stock-rearing practices in these Andean dairying systems are unrecognized and are often considered, wrongly, as underperforming and inadequate.

Six varieties of forage kochia (Kochia prostrata [L.] Schrad.), two Atriplex shrubs native to North America, and four drought-tolerant perennial grass varieties were seeded and evaluated under arid rangeland conditions in Jordan. Varieties were seeded in December 2007 and evaluated in 2008 and 2009 at two sites. Conditions were dry with Qurain receiving 110 mm and 73 mm and Tal Rimah receiving 58 mm and 43 mm of annual precipitation during the winters of 2007/2008 and 2008/2009, respectively. Plants were more abundant and taller (P

Management of rangelands has largely operated under the paradigm of minimizing spatially discrete disturbances, often under the objective of reducing inherent heterogeneity within managed ecosystems. This has led to a simplified understanding of rangelands and in many cases simplified rangelands. We argue that this type of management focus is incapable of maintaining biodiversity.