Cattle are one of the main instruments for economic (e.g., milk, meat, and cattle sale) and social (e.g., marriage, death, dispute settlement, and gift giving) exchange in Uganda. They serve as the main source of livelihood for a large majority of rural Ugandans, especially in the cattle corridor. Recent statistics demonstrate that the livestock sector contributes 13.1 percent of the agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) and 5 percent of the national GDP.

This report provides an overview of the conflict in Loliondo, reviewing historical information, current land uses and tenure arrangements. 

The rapid increase in global biofuel production and consumption, particularly of ethanol, has an associated derived demand for crops to produce the necessary feedstock. This working paper assess the implications of global biofuel expansion on Brazilian land usage at the regional level.The document reveals that most of the expansion in global ethanol consumption outside the US is met by Brazilian ethanol production.

Understanding the relationships between biodiversity and land-use is a key element for the development of effective conservation strategies. We studied a mid-altitude steppe-like area of Southern France, the Causse de Sauveterre, that has been grazed for many centuries. The decrease of human population during the 20th century, particularly since the end of 2nd World War, and the ongoing changes in agricultural practices may have dramatic effects on many biodiversity components of these landscapes.

It is now widely accepted that agricultural intensification drives the decline of biodiversity and related ecosystem services like pollination. Conservation management, such as agri-environment schemes (AES), has been introduced to counteract these declines, but in Western European countries these tend to produce mixed biodiversity benefits. Not much is known about the effects of AES in Central and Eastern European countries. We evaluated the effect of reduced stocking rates (0.5cow/ha vs. >1cow/ha) on bees and insect-pollinated plants in semi-natural pastures in Hungary.

Dominant plant species are often used as indicators of site potential in forest and rangelands. However, subspecies of dominant vegetation often indicate different site characteristics and, therefore, may be more useful indicators of plant community potential and provide more precise information for management. Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) occurs across large expanses of the western United States.

Two long-term (16 year) experiments on intensively managed pastures compared extensive grazing, abandonment and continued intensive grazing and were assessed for impacts on soil parameters, plant nutrient content and ecological indicator values. There was a reduction in soil carbon and nitrogen in the abandoned treatment compared to the intensively managed treatment at the wetter site. At the drier site, extensive grazing resulted in a build up of soil carbon. There was a build up of dead organic matter and a reduction in the nutritive value of the vegetation as grazing was reduced.

We combine historical maps and satellite derived data to reconstruct the development of a Swedish boreal landscape over the past 300 years. The aim is to understand legacies from past use patterns in present-day forest composition and consequences for conservation objectives from a landscape perspective. We analyze landscape development in cross-tabulation matrixes, building change trajectories. These trajectories are tested in linear models to explain the distribution of present-day landscape composition of coniferous, mixed, and deciduous forests >110 years.

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.

Rangelands and savannas occupy 70% of the Australian continent and are mainly used for commercial grazing of sheep and cattle. In the center and north, where there are extensive areas of indigenous land ownership and pastoral production is less intensive, savanna burning is frequent. Greenhouse gas emissions from rangelands have been overwhelmingly from land clearing and methane production by livestock.

The expansion of the artificial water-point network and livestock grazing in arid and semi-arid Australia has significantly increased access to water by water limited herbivores and thus has potential to seriously negatively affect the unique endemic flora and fauna. We examined the effects of the expansion of the water-point network on the arid and semi-arid zone bird community, using data from the Atlas of Australia bird surveys of 1977-1981 and 1996-2001. We examined whether traits of species could be used to uncover the critical ecological processes altered by this land use change.

The difficulty of determining the intake of browse grazed by goats is widely recognized. We suggest that a reasonable estimate of the amount of edible browse available to goats grazing shrubby Mediterranean vegetation can be derived from actual grazing data of goat herds that have obtained most of their annual maintenance requirements from pasture dominated by shrubs or shrubby trees. We have conducted such estimates on three forests in the Hills of Judea, two of which were grazed by milking herds and one by a herd producing mainly kids.