Despite this, only a fraction of original grasslands in the United States now remains, and their rate of conversion to cropland has recently reaccelerated. They supply vital resources for society, support an abundance of wildlife species, and store rich carbon reserves beneath their surfaces. Grasslands are among the most endangered ecosystems in the world.
100th meridian Patch#
Efforts to promote heterogeneity-based rangeland management for biodiversity conservation through the restoration of patch burn grazing and prairie dog conservation will require increased valuation of ranchers’ care work. to limit risk under uncertain weather and forage availability conditions. For example, ranchers’ care-based decision-making leads to conservative stocking approaches to “manage for the middle,” e.g. Ranchers facing complexity and uncertainty often sought “middle-ground” strategies to balance multiple, conflicting responsibilities in rangeland social-ecological systems.
We contrast traditional decision-making frameworks with those described by interviewees when high levels of environmental and market uncertainty or ecological complexity led ranchers toward use of care-based, flexible and relational frameworks for decision-making. We used modified grounded theory analysis of repeated interviews with ranchers to (1) compare rancher decision-making under relatively certain and uncertain conditions and (2) describe a typology of practices used to prioritize and choose management actions that maintain effective stewardship of these often multi-generational ranches. We draw on the ethics of care theoretical framework to explore how ranchers choose management actions. This paradigm, however, has limited application for ranchers as they manage extensive beef production operations under high levels of social-ecological complexity and uncertainty. In the Great Plains of North America rangeland ecology has increasingly recognized the importance of managing rangeland vegetation heterogeneity to address conservation and production goals. Ranchers and pastoralists worldwide manage and depend upon resources from rangelands (which support indigenous vegetation with the potential for grazing) across Earth’s terrestrial surface. Modeling soils on the foundation provided in the complex systems sciences remains an area for innovations useful for improving soil system management. Results indicated that soil system trade-offs arising from conservation adoption (drip irrigation or no-tillage) provided reasonable supporting evidence (via compensating feedbacks) to managers justifying slow adoption of conservation practices. Key soil feedbacks are captured via a variety of previously developed models simulating soil processes and their interactions.
In order to improve interpretation of these soil feedbacks, a dynamic systems framework is outlined (capturing feedback often excluded from investigation or left to intuition) and then applied to agroecosystem management problems related to irrigation or tillage practices that drive nutrient cycling (e.g., soil water, nitrogen, carbon, and sodium).
100th meridian full#
This poses significant challenges for managers or policy makers responding to environmental externalities where soil dynamics play a central role (e.g., biogeochemical cycles) and where full ranges of outcomes result from numerous feedback processes not easily captured by reductionist approaches. Unfortunately, human intuition and decision making has been shown to be inadequate when dealing with complex systems. Due to tightly coupled physical, chemical, and biological processes that often behave in nonlinear, counterintuitive ways, it is argued that soil is an archetype of a complex system.