Woody plant expansion has been documented on grasslands worldwide as a result of overgrazing and fire suppression, but changes in ecosystem structure and function accompanying this phenomenon have yet to be extensively studied in the temperate semi-arid grasslands of North America. The primary objectives of this study were to determine the influence of woody plant expansion on soil carbon (C), soil nitrogen (N), and roots to a depth of 15 cm along a 42-year (1963-2005) chronosequence encompassing grassland, woodland, and transition zones in a northern Great Plains grassland.

The art and science of developing effective policies and practices to enhance sustainability and adapt to new climate conditions on rangelands and savannas are typically founded on addressing the “average” or “typical” resource user. However, this assumption is flawed since it does not appreciate the extent of diversity among resource users; it risks that strategies will be irrelevant for many people and ignored, and that the grazing resource itself will remain unprotected. Understanding social heterogeneity is vital for effective natural resource management.

A number of previous studies have emphasized the determinants of land-use change, as well as the management of communal lands in the pastoral systems, without assessing the effects of such changes on pastoralists/agro-pastoralists’ food security. Therefore, the objective of this paper was to assess the determinants of food security under changing land use and land management systems—from communal to private investment—using household survey data collected from pastoral and agro-pastoral communities. The data were analyzed using ordinary least-square econometric analysis.

The effects of land management and disturbance on ecosystem performance (i.e. biomass production) are often confounded by those of weather and site potential. The current study overcomes this issue by calculating the difference between actual and expected ecosystem performance (EEP) to generate ecosystem performance anomalies (EPA). This study aims to delineate and quantify average EPA from 2000–2009 within the Greater Platte and Upper Colorado River Basins, USA.

The potential and regeneration capacity of soil seed banks in three eastern Ethiopian rangeland ecosystems (Asbuli grassland or arid grassland, Aydora open savanna or arid bush/grassland and Hurso closed savanna or arid bush land) were determined over a degradation gradient. Soil samples from 0.09m² blocks (100mm deep) were spread evenly in plastic containers in the greenhouse and studied over a 1-year period. The aboveground species composition was also compared. Sampling was from rangelands in excellent, good, moderate and poor conditions for each ecosystem.

An estimated 110 Mt of dust is eroded by wind from the Australian land surface each year, most of which originates from the arid and semi-arid rangelands. Livestock production is thought to increase the susceptibility of the rangelands to wind erosion by reducing vegetation cover and modifying surface soil stability. However, research is yet to quantify the impacts of grazing land management on the erodibility of the Australian rangelands, or determine how these impacts vary among land types and over time.

Previous studies in drylands have shown that while gender roles are becoming more flexible, privatization and formalization of land tenure tends to marginalize women in drylands while environmental degradation leads to differential changes in gender workload. Chepareria, a ward in West Pokot County, has undergone the above-mentioned tenure and environmental changes and is nowadays dominated by private enclosures as a land management approach.

This paper mapped and valued key inter-related drylands ecosystem services of importance to pastoralists, crop farmers, the tourism industry, conservationists, and policy planners in the Ewaso Ng’iro basin, the largest of the five major basins in Kenya. We used an ecosystem services approach where only final benefits are valued to avoid double counting. The final benefits are ecosystem services or commodities which have an economic value.

Long-term water balance investigations are needed to better understand hydrologic systems, especially semi-arid mountainous catchments. These systems exhibit considerable interannual variability in precipitation as well as spatial variation in snow accumulation, soils, and vegetation. This study extended a previous 10-year water balance based on measurements and model simulations to 24years for the Upper Sheep Creek (USC) catchment, a 26ha, snow-fed, semi-arid rangeland headwater drainage within the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed in southwestern Idaho, USA.

QUESTION: Increasing population pressure, socio‐economic development and associated natural resource use in savannas are resulting in large‐scale land cover changes, which can be mapped using remote sensing. Is a three‐dimensional (3D) woody vegetation structural classification applied to LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data better than a 2D analysis to investigate change in fine‐scale woody vegetation structure over 2 yrs in a protected area (PA) and a communal rangeland (CR)? LOCATION: Bushbuckridge Municipality and Sabi Sand Wildtuin, NE South Africa.

Desertification is an escalating concern in global drylands, yet assessments to guide management and policy responses are limited by ambiguity concerning what this term means and what processes are involved. In order to provide greater clarity, we propose that desertification assessments be placed within a state change-land use change (SC-LUC) framework. SC-LUC views desertification as state change occurring within the context of particular land uses (such as rangeland or cropland) and interacting with land use change.

Woody encroachment is one of the several factors aggravating rangeland degradation in arid and semiarid areas. The goal of this study is to improve our understanding about the relationship between woody encroachment and its potential drivers by analyzing the temporal and spatial pattern of land-cover changes in the lower Omo region of southern Ethiopia. We used a combination of multi-temporal images, as well as climatic and demographic data for the analysis.