Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

Rangelands—grasslands, shrublands, and savannas that support grazing livestock—cover roughly half the world's land surface and sustain the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of pastoralists who depend on mobile herding to track shifting forage and water. Degradation of these systems, driven by overgrazing, land tenure pressures, and increasingly erratic rainfall linked to climate change, threatens both the ecological function of grasslands and the food security of communities with few alternative income sources. Researchers are working to understand how traditional ecological knowledge held by pastoralists can inform more adaptive land management, and how monitoring tools and governance frameworks can be designed to reflect the dynamic, non-equilibrium nature of dryland ecosystems rather than forcing them into static, fence-and-manage models. Central open questions include how to build policy that legitimizes pastoral mobility at national and international scales, and how to measure and attribute degradation in ways that are both ecologically valid and practically useful for decision-makers.

Works

95,709

Total citations

723,191

Keywords

Rangeland DegradationPastoralistsLivelihoodsEcological KnowledgeClimate ChangeSustainability