Rangelands essentially comprise geographical regions dominated by grass with or without scattered woody plants. Rangelands are often considered to function primarily as feed for livestock. In this view, conservation and biodiversity issues are secondary. The alternate view involves recognising rangelands as a biome without a specific function, but where there is an implied responsibility for in...

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 provide the main forage resource for livestock in many parts of the world, but maintaining long-term productivity and providing sufficient income for the rancher remains a challenge. One key issue is to maintain the rangeland in conditions where the rancher has the greatest possibility to adapt his/her management choices to a highly fluctuating and uncertain environment. In this stud...

Woody biomass dynamics are an expression of ecosystem function, yet biomass estimates do not provide information on the spatial distribution of woody vegetation within the vertical vegetation subcanopy. We demonstrate the ability of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to measure aboveground biomass and subcanopy structure, as an explanatory tool to unravel vegetation dynamics in struct...

There is growing evidence of escalating wildlife losses worldwide. Extreme wildlife losses have recently been documented for large parts of Africa, including western, Central and Eastern Africa. Here, we report extreme declines in wildlife and contemporaneous increase in livestock numbers in Kenya rangelands between 1977 and 2016. Our analysis uses systematic aerial monitoring survey data colle...

due to the notable role of different land uses in carbon sequestration and emission, four treatments including rangeland as control, haloxylon plantation area, olea plantation (olive garden), and residential lands, were selected to study the effects of land use change on soil carbon sequestration and emissions in eivanakei rangelands, semnan province. carbon stocks in vegetation and soil of eac...

To document trends in land use and herbaceous production, 71 field sites sampled among cropped fields, fallow fields and rangelands in the Fakara region (Niger) were monitored from 1994 to 2006. The overall trend in land use confirmed the historical increase of the cropped areas since mid 20th century, at an annual rate of 2% from 1994 to 2006. This trend is the result of changes in the relativ...

Reciprocal altruism is paradoxical; theoretically the more one is trusted, the better the outcomes from one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas, although for individuals the best outcomes are when trust is not reciprocated. Most real life games are not one-shot, but iterated where trust develops through past actions (Cárdenas and Ostrom, 2004). Furthermore, in social-ecological systems outcomes are driven...