Rangeland Policies For The Future

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book provides an unprecedented synthesis of the current status of scientific and management knowledge regarding global rangelands and the major challenges that confront them. It has been organized around three major themes. The first summarizes the conceptual advances that have occurred in the rangeland profession. The second addresses the implications of these conceptual advances to management and policy. The third assesses several major challenges confronting global rangelands in the 21st century. This book will compliment applied range management textbooks by describing the conceptual foundation on which the rangeland profession is based. It has been written to be accessible to a broad audience, including ecosystem managers, educators, students and policy makers. The content is founded on the collective experience, knowledge and commitment of 80 authors who have worked in rangelands throughout the world. Their collective contributions indicate that a more comprehensive framework is necessary to address the complex challenges confronting global rangelands. Rangelands represent adaptive social-ecological systems, in which societal values, organizations and capacities are of equal importance to, and interact with, those of ecological processes. A more comprehensive framework for rangeland systems may enable management agencies, and educational, research and policy making organizations to more effectively assess complex problems and develop appropriate solutions.

The 11 papers in this document address issues and needs in the development and stewardship of Central Asia rangelands, and identify directions for future work. With its vast rangelands and numerous pastoral populations, Central Asia is a region of increasing importance to rangeland scientists, managers, and pastoral development specialists. Five of the papers address rangeland issues in Mongolia, three papers specifically address studies in China, two papers address Kazakhstan, and one paper addresses the use of satellite images for natural resource planning across Central Asia. These papers comprise the proceedings from a general technical conference at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society for Range Management, held at Salt Lake City, Utah, January 24-30, 2004. As the 2004 SRM Conference theme was "Rangelands in Transition," these papers focus on an area of the world that has experienced dramatic socio-economic changes in 20th Century associated with adoption of communism and command economies and the subsequent collapse of the command economies and the recent transition to a free market economies. The changes in land use and land tenure policies that accompanied these shifts in socio economic regimes have had dramatic impacts on the region's rangelands and the people who use them.

Excerpt from Rangeland Policies for the Future: Proceedings of a Symposium January 28-31, 1979, Tucson, Arizona Through the Symposium, people of many back grounds and interests were given an opportunity to listen, and to be heard. These proceedings bring together papers presented during the 2 days, except for several that were not available to the editors. Also presented are statements submitted by attendees and responses to questions submitted at the Symposium. Dialogue during discussion sessions at the conclusion of each panel session is not included. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The findings and recommendations of the NAS committee in over eighty professional papers presented at workshops designed to assess various aspects of range management.

Although traditionally defined as areas where natural vegetation is exploited for grazing by domestic and native herbivores, rangelands are used by many different people, for a host of purposes. As well as livestock products, rangelands provide fuels, minerals and water and are used for ecotourism, recreation, nature conservation and as carbon sinks. More than half of the earth's land surface is rangeland and millions of people, both within and outside the rangelands, depend on them. This book addresses the important issues confronting the rangelands and presents new concepts and approaches for the management of rangeland resources. It is relevant to the people who live in or depend on the rangelands, and to the institutions and organisations that support them.