Grazing lands, including the native rangelands, cover an extensive area of southeastern United States, representing important component carbon balance for region. In Florida, rangelands extend over 3.1 Mha, experiencing a natural fire frequency between 2 – 5 years and strong climatic variability. Management includes prescribed mechanical brush control. This study is first its kind assessing imp...

The San Francisco Bay Area in California, USA is a highly heterogeneous region in climate, topography, and habitats, as well as in its political and economic interests. Successful conservation strategies must consider various current and future competing demands for the land, and should pay special attention to livestock grazing, the dominant non-urban land-use. The main objective of this study...

Prescribed fires are used to manipulate and manage rangelands, but effective monitoring techniques are needed to ensure that management goals and objectives are being met. The application of an effective fire program on rangelands is not a simple task. Overgrazing by livestock since the early development of the livestock industry has altered the vegetative complex on most rangelands with an inc...

The Santa Rita Experimental Range is 100 years old this year, providing an occasion to celebrate and to reflect. The first of many experimental ranges in the United States, the Santa Rita was founded at a time when both range science and plant ecology were in their infancy. The purpose was to conduct research that would aid in the management of Southwestern rangelands by public agencies and pri...

This paper analyzes regulatory design for agroecosystem management on public rangelands. We present an informational and institutional environment where three of the most prominent regulatory instruments on public rangelands – input regulation, cost-sharing/taxation, and performance regulation – can be defined and compared. The paper examines how the optimal regulation is shaped by the informat...

In the last decade environmental policies, particularly ecological resettlement, have changed China’s pastoral areas. This paper explores the diffi culty in conserving rangeland through ecological resettlement. The paper focuses on how ecological resettlement policy has been translated into practice, and how the affected people responded with migration decisions. Empirical fi ndings in a pastor...

Strong sustainability, according to the common definition, requires that different natural and economic capital stocks have to be maintained as physical quantities separately. Yet, in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed. To therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner, we propose to use the concept of viability. Viability means that the differen...

Rangeland degradation is a global concern that exacerbated by soil loss through water erosion. A deeper understanding of rainfall and runoff dynamics can assist in the development sustainable management strategies. Current methods to measure surface (e.g., natural plots, simulation overland flow experiments, modeling approaches) have many advantages but be prohibitively expensive, may require c...

Climate change is predicted to alter the rainfall regime in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin: total annual rainfall will decrease, while seasonal and inter-annual variation in rainfall will increase. Such changes in the rainfall regime could potentially lead to large-scale changes in aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) in the region.We conducted a data-driven evaluation of herbaceous ANP...