Dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) play a major role in nutrient cycling, soil aeration, and the biological control of pests and parasites that breed in manure. Habitat fragmentation, pesticide usage, and conventional agricultural practices are threats to dung beetle diversity, and their conservation is of growing concern. Comparison of organic and conventional ranching practices is of gre...

Conventional ranching in Chiapas, Mexico includes a yearly pasture burn and agrochemical use that decreases the biodiversity and forest cover of ranch lands. Ranchers, self-described members of a “club” in the Fraylesca region of Chiapas, Mexico, have bucked convention and eliminated burns and agrochemicals from their systems after decades of use because they believed that the land and their pr...

Background: Ever the dominant forest type along the Pacific coast of Central America, the tropical dry forest ecosystem is now the most severely endangered in the Neotropics, only 1.7% of the original cover remains in Central America (CalvoAlvarado et al., 2009). The Azuero Peninsula of Panama has lost most of its tropical dry forest due to the expansion of the agricultural frontier, which bega...

Rangeland researchers are increasingly interested in understanding working rangelands as integrated social-ecological systems and in investigating the contexts of human decision-making processes that support system resilience. U.S. public lands ranchers are key partners in rangeland conservation, but the role of women in building system resilience has not yet been explored. We conducted life-hi...

Background: Conventional cattle ranching and agricultural practices have severely degraded and fragmented tropical forests in Latin America. This trend has resulted in the loss of a range of ecosystem services upon which humans depend, especially those that support agricultural production, such as biodiversity, the provision of water and soil fertility. Consequently, conventional cattle ranchin...

Although livestock anthrax is declining in many parts of the world, with an increasing number of countries probably truly free of the disease, anthrax remains enzootic in many national parks and even in some game ranching areas. These infected areas can present a persistent risk to surrounding livestock, which may otherwise be free of the disease, as well as a public health risk. The authors us...