Rangeland health assessment provides qualitative information on ecosystemattributes. We examined changes in rangeland health in the Zagros semi-arid rangelands ofIran at fixed sites between 2001 and 2011, over the 10-year period. The rangelandfragments significantly declines in the quality of the vegetation, and changes in plantspecies were driven largely by seasonality, and to a lesser extent,...

Ecological restoration of rangelands using wild-collected seeds can be challenging due to low seed quality, inconvenient anatomy, and poor plant establishment. In North America, the half-shrub winterfat (Krascheninnikovia lanata) is a valuable protein-rich forage for wildlife livestock. Seeds this species are contained in one-seeded fruits enclosed four fluffy, silky bracts. While removed from ...

Abstract Remotely sensed soil moisture products showed sensitivity to vegetation cover density and typology at regional dryland level. In these regions, drought monitoring is significantly performed using index rainfall data. Recently, observations have increasingly become available. This has hampered scientific progress as regards characterization of land surface processes not just in meteorol...

Atriplex spp. (Atriplex canescens, A. lentiformis and A. halimus) plantation has been extensively used to reclaim rangeland in Iran for the past several decades. However, the impacts of this practice have been controversial. Due to the increasing adoption of this reclamation technique for degraded rangelands, it is important to investigate its impacts. The aim of this study was to investigate t...

Rangeland degradation is one of the global concerns affecting the pastoralists and those who suffer from its negative environmental consequences. Grazing exclosure has been extensively used among the techniques implemented by the government to protect the fertility of threatened rangelands. The impact of exclosure has been a controversial issue; therefore, it is important to understand its effe...

A grazing enclosure (GE) is one of the most effective techniques for restoring degraded rangelands by modifying composition, abundance, and diversity species. However, effect GEs on different intensities durations compared to open-grazing (OG) not well known. We aimed assess GE characteristics plant established five plots in a short-term enclosure, long-term an OG treatment examine vegetation s...

The main challenge to restoration in Iceland is vast areas of severely degraded land that has limited resource retention and limited ecosystem functioning. These are often hostile environments for plant establishment and survival, due to unstable surfaces that are prone to intensive cryoturbation and erosion by wind and have limited water-holding capacity. Most of the degraded rangelands are op...

Degradation characterized by depleted vegetation cover is a serious environmental problem in African rangelands. It poses threat to millions of pastoralists and agropastoralists who depend on livestock as source livelihood. Consequently, there has been growing global interest consolidate efforts restore degraded ecosystems. For example, the UN decade Ecosystem Restoration initiative aims at uni...

Rangelands are uncultivated lands that include grasslands, savannahs, steppes, shrub lands, deserts and tundra. The native vegetation on rangelands is predominantly grasses, forbs and shrubs (Kothmann, 1974). Rangelands cover 31 percent of the land surface area of the United States (Havstad et al., 2009), and up to half of the land surface area worldwide (Lund, 2007). Most land areas that are n...