Rangelands最新文献

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  Grazing management for providing multiple ecosystem services at the ranch scale requires balancing desired outcomes.

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  Abundant challenges involve matching the spatial heterogeneity in soils and associated plant community characteristics with the temporal variability in precipitation.

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  Prescriptive grazing (season-long continuous and time-controlled rotational grazing) removes the human experiential knowledge to adapt to changing conditions, whereas adaptive multipaddock (AMP) grazing often invokes high stock densities, which reduce livestock weight gain.

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  A “mix-and-match” or blending of both approaches for grazing management in the shortgrass steppe can result in reduced drought risk, enhanced breeding habitat availability for grassland bird species of concern, and sustained livestock production.

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  During grazing permit renewals, the Bureau of Land Management assesses land health using indicators typically measured using field-based data collected from individual sites within grazing allotments. However, agency guidance suggests assessments be completed at larger spatial scales.

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  We explored how the current generation of remotely sensed data products could be used to quantify aspects of land health at watershed scales in Colorado to provide broad spatial and temporal context for the land health assessment process.

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  We found multiple indicators could be quantified using these data products and were relevant to land health standards.

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  Within focal watersheds, bare ground cover decreased over the past 30 years, while annual herbaceous cover has increased over the last 10 years. Vegetation productivity was variable over time, but interannual fluctuations were consistent across watersheds.

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  Remotely sensed data products can help resource managers understand how current conditions relate to broad spatial and temporal trends in the region and could provide another line of evidence for the land health assessment process. They may also identify target areas where management strategies, such as eradication of invasive annual grasses, should be focused, and could help resource managers communicate complex issues to the public.

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  Sense of place can play a significant role in landowner well-being; yet is subjective, complex, and difficult to quantify.

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  Through a regression tree analysis of mail survey responses from landowners in the US Edwards Plateau, Central Great Plains, and Flint Hills, we found landowners have diverse senses of place based on a variety of place meanings and differing levels of place attachment.

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  Despite social and ecological regional differences, sense of place was similarly diverse within each region rather than specific to region.

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  Personal experiences related to way of life, peace and quiet, personal legacy, autonomy, and inspiration may be fundamental meanings for place attachment and well-being on private lands.

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  The potential for landowners’ place meanings and attachment to contribute to their well-being necessitate including sense of place in efforts toward socially and environmentally sustainable private lands management.

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  The Long-Term Agroecosystem Research Network launched the LTAR Agricultural Performance Indicator Framework to evaluate how agricultural innovations perform relative to sustainable intensification goals in five domains: Environment, Productivity, Economic, Human Condition, and Social.

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  Here we describe our progress and plans for measuring the performance of agricultural innovations on rangelands.

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  We present a method for measuring outcomes of management innovations against site-specific benchmarks, which can be applied in grazinglands worldwide.

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  LTAR typically studies management on fine scales (ecological site, ranch); how to measure effects on broad scales (landscape, community) remains a persistent question.

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  LTAR’s Agricultural Performance Indicator Framework will evolve with stakeholder engagement.

• Integrated social-ecological research is crucial for the development and assessment of sustainable agricultural production that supports health and well-being for producers, rural communities, and agroecosystems.

• One challenge for integration is that commonly used concepts like ecosystem services do not represent all environmental processes that support or degrade health and well-being.

• Social change processes also impact health and well-being. Here we focus on a core, and often underrepresented example—communal processes.

• Communal processes include social interactions for a common interest or purpose, or for deliberation and decision-making about a shared locality.

• Many (but not all) communal processes foster relationships that strengthen a community's capacity for collective action while helping individuals and families cope with environmental stressors.

• Research on communal processes of health and well-being complements research on ecosystem services and agricultural production to better represent social-ecological interdependencies and strengthen interdisciplinary approaches to rangelands research.