The land management practices of pastoralist Maasai communities have a major bearing on landscapes and wildlife habitats in northern Tanzania and play a key role in maintaining habitat for one of the world's most spectacular assemblages of terrestrial large mammals. Pastoralists manage lands according to locally devised rules designed to manage and conserve key resources such as pastures and wa...

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...

We monitored pasture biomass on 20 permanent plots over 35 years to gauge the reliability of rainfall and NDVI as proxy measures of forage shortfalls in a savannah ecosystem. Both proxies are reliable indicators of pasture biomass at the onset of dry periods but fail to predict shortfalls in prolonged dry spells. In contrast, grazing pressure predicts pasture deficits with a high degree of accu...

We assessed whether prior foraging by wild herbivores affected foraging behaviour of cattle in Laikipia rangeland, Kenya, during February 2001, August 2001 and February 2002. The study compared cattle bite rate, step rate and bites per step in plots exclusively accessible to cattle and those accessible to cattle and large wild herbivores. During February 2001 when conditions were dry, cattle bi...

Understanding the dynamics of semi-arid rangelands is a prerequisite for their proper management and long-term enclosure experiments are an important tool to investigate grazing impact. Hein (2006) presents findings from a 10 year enclosure experiment in the semi-arid Ferlo, Senegal. His main conclusion is that current high grazing pressure (0.15–0.20 TLU/h) negatively affects rain use efficien...

The impacts of wild herbivores on cattle diet selection were investigated in an East African rangeland during August 2001 and February 2002. The study compared cattle diets in plots exclusively accessible to cattle (C) and those accessible to megaherbivores (elephants and giraffes), non-megaherbivore wild herbivores . 15 kg (zebras, hartebeests, Grant’s gazelles, oryx, elands, and buffaloes) an...

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...

ecological studies on range plants enhance our knowledge on the rangeland ecosystems which are useful for their planning and management.  by doing field and laboratory experiments during 2008-2009, ecological conditions were studied in the main habitats of z. atriplicoides in the rural and winter rangelands of northern khorasan province (nkp). forage quality was also studied at different phonol...