Grazing intensity and bush encroachment are disturbance factors that may alter the floristic composition of herbaceous species. This paper investigates impacts of grazing (intensity) and bush encroachment on herbaceous species and rangeland conditions in Borana, southern Ethiopia. Herbaceous species richness and the abundance of each species were greater in the light‐ and moderate‐grazed areas than heavy‐grazed sampling plots. Similarly, herbaceous species richness was highest at an intermediate level of biomass and seems to decline as biomass increases.

Investigating traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) by the scientific approach is a useful way to develop sustainable rangeland management. Numerous trials have been done on plant species compositions and biomass, but little testing has been done on the TEK of plant productivity and nutrient values, which are important for proper rangeland management. In this study, we tested the TEK of pastoralists living in Bulgan, northern Mongolia, regarding plant productivity and nutrient values. We examined biomass, growth form, plant productivity, and crude protein amounts along grazing gradients.

Wildfires increased dramatically in frequency and extent in the European Mediterranean region from the 1960s, aided by a general warming and drying trend, but driven primarily by socio-economic changes, including rural depopulation, land abandonment and afforestation with flammable species. Published research into post-wildfire hydrology and soil erosion, beginning during the 1980s in Spain, has been followed by studies in other European Mediterranean countries together with Israel and has now attained a sufficiently large critical mass to warrant a major review.

The South African government has endeavoured to strengthen property rights in communal areas and develop civil society institutions for community-led development and natural resource management. However, the effectiveness of this remains unclear as the emergence and operation of civil society institutions in these areas is potentially constrained by the persistence of traditional authorities. Focusing on the former Transkei region of Eastern Cape Province, three case study communities are used examine the extent to which local institutions overlap in issues of land access and control.

Burning of savanna is a globally important source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In Australia, burning of savanna contributes between 2% and 4% annually of the nation’s reportable emissions. Complete removal of this source of emissions is unrealistic because fire is a ubiquitous natural process and important land-management tool. In the rangelands of northern Australia, fire is used to manage habitat for conservation, control woodland thickening, manipulate pastures for grazing and is an essential component of indigenous cultural and land-management practice.

China's Horquin area in the northern farming–pastoral transition zone is undergoing rapid land degradation and rangeland modification that is impacting far broader areas as the source of material for dust storms. Multi-temporal Landsat images of the Horquin core area were used to generate a time series of land use covering about a 30-year period, 1975–2003. We show that the physical environment in Horquin deteriorated between 1975 and 2000, although this situation was more controlled after 2000.

Agistment is the practice of temporarily moving stock between properties, and is used by pastoralists both to strategically develop their enterprises and as a response to environmental heterogeneities such as variation in rainfall. This paper considers the agistment market in the northern Australian rangelands using the 'market failure framework'. This form of economic analysis identifies failings in a market, thus, provides a rigorous basis for designing interventions intended to improve market performance.

The mobile pastoral system in the far north region of Cameroon is an excellent example of the paradox of pastoral land tenure, in that pastoralists need secure access to pasture and water, but also flexibility in resource use, i.e. the ability to move elsewhere because of spatio-temporal variation in resource availability.

Livestock grazing potentially has substantial influence on fuel characteristics in rangelands around the globe. However, information quantifying the impacts of grazing on rangeland fuel characteristics is limited, and the effects of grazing on fuels are important because fuel characteristics are one of the primary factors determining risk, severity, continuity, and size of wildfires.

Two strategies are assessed to increase wheat production in the water-scarce Karkheh River Basin (KRB) in Iran to meet targets by the year 2025. The strategies proposed are (a) to increase yields in the current irrigated and rainfed wheat areas and (b) to increase the area under rainfed wheat through land conversion. Crop water consumption, based on satellite remote sensing and crop yield data, was used to estimate crop water productivity (CWP) in irrigated and rainfed wheat areas in five sub-basins.

We explored the ecological effects of grassland restoration programs using satellite imagery and field plots sampling data and analyzing the patterns and mechanisms of land cover change and vegetation activities in arid and semiarid China during the period from 1982 to 2008. The grassland cover in the 1980s, 2000 and 2005 was compared before and after the restoration programs. The variability of net primary production (NPP) and rain use efficiency (RUE) were analyzed as indicators of vegetation productivity.