The complexity of natural resource management is increasingly recognized and requires adaptive governance at multiple levels. It is particularly significant to explore the impacts of government interventions on the management practices of local communities and on target social-ecological systems. The Inner Mongolian rangeland was traditionally managed by indigenous people using their own instit...

Conservation policy often incentivizes managers of human-impacted areas to create landscape heterogeneity to maximize biodiversity. In rangeland, patchy disturbance regimes create landscape heterogeneity (patch contrast), but outcomes of heterogeneity-based management are rarely tested for a universal response. We analyzed four habitat variables – vegetation structure, plant functional group co...

The most important decision for successful range management is setting a proper stocking rate. The stocking rate affects rangeland health and productivity, livestock production, and economic returns. Because of its importance, much rangeland research has focused on answering the question, "what is the proper stocking rate?" However, like many important questions in life, it is not easily answer...

In applied studies, the investigation of the relationship between a plant species and environmental variables is essential to manage ecological problems and rangeland ecosystems. This research was conducted in summer 2016. The aim of this study was to compare the predictive power of a number of Species Distribution Models (SDMs) and to evaluate the importance of a range of environmental variabl...