Rangelands最新文献

Increasing concern from both private citizens and intergovernmental organizations about the effects of climate change has led to regulatory and voluntary mechanisms aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including an emerging carbon credit market.

Despite the opportunities for landowners to diversify revenue streams within current operations, there are risks (i.e., production and financial, market, legal-transactional, and social) that could reduce landowner enrollment rates.

We used a systems thinking approach to map the feedback relationships among landowner decision-making considerations, soil system processes, and carbon credit market incentives.

Our findings illustrate the complex set of constraints of participation in carbon credit programs and how they interact by revealing a limits to growth archetype.

Landowners and crop and livestock producers are uniquely positioned to shape and develop the carbon credit market by filling the gap between equitable transaction participation for both carbon credit buyers and sellers looking to capture value from mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

Targeted grazing is a management strategy for fuel reduction and cheatgrass control in the Great Basin. However, concerns of cattle acting as endozoochorous seed dispersal agents of invasive grass species have been expressed.

In vitro and in situ techniques of ruminal fermentation and enzymatic digestion were employed to evaluate seed mortality.

Our results showed a nearly complete inhibition of germination after 36 hours in the rumen followed by 3 hours in the abomasum.

Our results indicate cattle grazing cheatgrass-infested rangelands will not spread cheatgrass seed via excrement.

Cheatgrass seeds consumed in the fall will have a slight lag in microbial degradation.

Southeastern New Mexico's rangelands are under stress due to a prolonged drought.

Atriplex lentiformis and Atriplex canescens are native forage halophytic shrub species.

In New Mexico and throughout the United States large amounts of water are generated daily during the extraction of oil and gas.

A. lentiformis and A. canescens grow in high soil salinity conditions, which infers they can be used for rangelands improvement.

Both these species could act as candidate crops for animal fodder grown in arid areas.

After years of overgrazing in the late 1800s and early 1900s with little to no management, range management efforts shifted to focus on eradication of sagebrush to promote forage production from World War II to the 1970s.

From the 1970s to present the paradigm shifted to an emphasis on leaving sagebrush intact for the benefit of sagebrush-obligate wildlife.

However, neither management paradigm has yielded an ideal outcome with approximately 30% of the Great Basin being identified as “poor condition shrubland,” with >10% shrub cover and a high ratio of annual to perennial herbaceous cover.

A combination of new and old restoration methods is needed to restore degraded sagebrush communities to rejuvenate the declining perennial herbaceous understories and increase biotic resiliency of the shrub community.

The concepts of ecosystem services and nature's contributions to people highlight linkages between people and nature, directly addressing relationships and the flow of values.

Understanding stakeholder values in specific collaborative contexts may aid in solution-focused approaches, minimizing tradeoffs, improved group cohesion, and partnership success, as rangeland managers attempt to match strategies to needs of landscapes and people.

Using a mixed-methods approach, we explored pluralistic, sociocultural values and perspectives of diverse stakeholders regarding rangeland ecosystem services.

We noted patterns in how stakeholder groups prioritized certain ecosystem services over others and how this prioritization is a reflection of unique yet overlapping values systems.

Sustainable rangeland management is about the ecological underpinnings of a place and also about supporting the people and communities who have direct relationships with those landscapes.