A critical challenge for range scientists is to provide input to management decisions for land units where little or no data exist. The disciplines of range science, basic ecology, and global ecology use different perspectives and approaches with different levels of detail to extrapolate information and understanding from well-studied locations to other land units.

Rangeland and pastures comprise about 42% of the total land area of the United States. About three-quarters of all domestic livestock depend upon grazing lands for survival. Many ranges have had domestic stock grazing for more than 100 years and, as a result, the plant composition has changed greatly from the original ecosystems. Western rangelands previously dominated by perennial bunchgrasses have been converted, primarily through overgrazing, to annual grasslands that are susceptible to invasion by introduced dicots. Today there are more than 300 rangeland weeds in the United States.

Grazing intensification and abandonment are increasing the risk of degradation of Mediterranean grasslands. The development of techniques for monitoring grazing effects on herbaceous vegetation is an essential need for the management of these rangelands. However, the high variability of these systems make physiographical and management effects hard to disentangle and quantify. We present a methodology to support rangeland management and assess grazing effects on environmentally heterogeneous areas, and provide an example of its application in a Mediterranean rangeland in central Spain.

Scattering slash (downed woody materials) after tree removal is increasingly prescribed by land managers as a treatment to promote the establishment and growth of understory vegetation in pinyon-juniper woodlands. However, the effects of scattering slash on soil resources and plant communities are poorly understood and often confounded with the release from tree competition.

Increasing land utilization through diverse forms of human activities, such as agriculture, forestry, urban growth, and industrial development, has led to negative impacts on the water quality of rivers. To find out how catchment attributes, such as land use, hydrologic soil groups, and lithology, can affect water quality variables (Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, Na⁺, Cl⁻, HCO₃⁻, pH, TDS, EC, SAR), a spatio-statistical approach was applied to 23 catchments in southern basins of the Caspian Sea.

Resistance to the use of prescribed fire is strong among many private land managers despite the advantages it offers for maintaining fire‐adapted ecosystems. Even managers who are aware of the benefits of using prescribed fire as a management tool avoid using it, citing potential liability as a major reason for their aversion. Recognizing the importance of prescribed fire for ecosystem management and the constraints current statutory schemes impose on its use, several states in the United States have undertaken prescribed burn statutory reform.

Vegetation dynamics in rangelands and other ecosystems are known to be mediated by topoedaphic properties. Vegetation monitoring programs, however, often do not consider the impact of soils and other sources of landscape heterogeneity on the temporal patterns observed. Ecological sites (ES) comprise a land classification system based on soil, topographic, and climate variations that can be readily applied by land managers to classify topoedaphic properties at monitoring locations.

Governance plays a key role in rangeland management. In China, all rangeland, including pastoral land and agro-pastoral land, is owned by the State. Since 1980, use rights have been granted to households by the Chinese government extending the household contract responsibility system (HCRS). But in the agro-pastoral areas of northwestern (NW) China, the rangeland degradation is more severe than that in pastoral areas. The HCRS is difficult to implement because the limited and fragmented grazing land cannot be contracted to individual households.

Spanish rangelands occupy more than 90,000km² of land grazed by millions of domestic and wild animals. Organic matter content of soil is an essential component for fertility and productivity in both, natural and human-induced ecosystems. Despite its importance to soil quality, soil organic carbon has been little studied in these rangelands. The main goal of this study is to assess the amounts and characteristics of soil organic matter in grazed open woodlands of SW Iberia as influenced by vegetation cover and land management.

Woody plant encroachment—the conversion of grasslands to woodlands—continues to transform rangelands worldwide, yet its causes and consequences remain poorly understood. Despite this being a coupled human-ecological phenomenon, research to date has tended toward ecological aspects of the issue. In this paper, we provide new insight into the long-term relationships between human demographics and woody plant cover at the landscape scale.

In China, three major rangeland management policies have caused dramatic social, economic, and ecological changes for pastoral regions in the past 30 yr: the Rangeland Household Contract Policy (RHCP), Rangeland Ecological Construction Projects (RECPs), and the Nomad Settlement Policy (NSP). The impacts of these policies are greatly debated. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of academic perspectives on the impacts of the three policies and the causes of ineffective and negative effects.