Desertification has occurred worldwide. The biophysical and socio-economic complexity of this phenomenon has challenged our ability to categorize, inventory, monitor and repair the condition of degraded lands. One of the most important distinctions to be made in relation to land degradation is between cultivated land used for annual crop production and `rangelands'. Grazing by free-roaming livestock is the traditional primary use of the world's rangelands. However, there is growing recognition of the importance of these vast acreages for wildlife habitat, hydrology and ground water recharge, recreation and aesthetics. This text focuses on the desertification of rangelands and explores processes, problems and solutions. Chapters in the first section evaluate interactions between `natural' and human-induced disturbance regimes, thresholds, and non-linear change with respect to vegetation, hydrology, nutrients and erosion. Chapters in the second section examine socio-economic constraints and approaches for preventing and reversing degradation. The book provides a contemporary, process-oriented perspective on rangeland degradation of value to students, policy-makers and professionals alike.

Desertification has occurred worldwide. The biophysical and socio-economic complexity of this phenomenon has challenged our ability to categorize, inventory, monitor and repair the condition of degraded lands. One of the most important distinctions to be made in relation to land degradation is between cultivated land used for annual crop production and `rangelands'. Grazing by free-roaming livestock is the traditional primary use of the world's rangelands. However, there is growing recognition of the importance of these vast acreages for wildlife habitat, hydrology and ground water recharge, recreation and aesthetics. This text focuses on the desertification of rangelands and explores processes, problems and solutions. Chapters in the first section evaluate interactions between `natural' and human-induced disturbance regimes, thresholds, and non-linear change with respect to vegetation, hydrology, nutrients and erosion. Chapters in the second section examine socio-economic constraints and approaches for preventing and reversing degradation. The book provides a contemporary, process-oriented perspective on rangeland degradation of value to students, policy-makers and professionals alike.

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.

This book provides reference material for those responsible for grazing land management in China and its long-term consequences (environmental, social and economic). It responds to the urgent need to collate and review some of the major degradation experienced in China's vast pastoral lands. An outline is presented of the major biological processes and socioeconomic influences that operate in selected pastoral rangelands in China. In this book, the authors had confined their analysis to the impact on the resource from a rangeland user's perspective, but recognized the much wider impacts and urge fellow researchers to take up the challenge of addressing the environmental and social impacts of these major land degradation episodes. The historical case studies described in the book represent a failure to manage for the extreme climate variability that characterizes north and west China's vast arid rangelands.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the Advanced Research Workshop on ‘The Socio-economic causes and consequences of desertification in Central Asia’ held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in June 2006. The meeting provided a forum for twenty-six scientists from Central Asia and NATO countries to discuss the human dimensions of the desertifi- tion process. Papers presented to the meeting examined recent scientific evidence on the impact of desertification on livestock production, public health, and biodiversity, and contributed to the formulation of coh- ent national and regional policies for the management of watersheds, rangelands, and irrigated agriculture. The meeting was co-directed by Roy Behnke of the Macaulay Institute, UK, and by Lapas Alibekov of the Samarkand State University, Uzbekistan. Both the workshop and this subsequent publication have been financed by the NATO Scientific Affairs Division and we gratefully acknowledge this support. The Bishkek meeting was ably hosted by the Kyrgyz Sheep Breeders Association under the dir- tion of Akylbek Rakaev who contributed substantially to the successful running of the workshop. Deliberations at the workshop emphasized that policy failures at national level had promoted desertification within the region.

It now seems incontrovertible (as Alessandra Giannini has demonstrated) that the series of Sahelian droughts that began in the early 1970s were driven by changes in sea surface temperatures and that they were not caused by local land use mismanagement in the Sahel itself. Combined with the apparent re-greening of the Sahel, these findings effectively close a long-standing policy and scientific debate (in which the lead authors of this book participated) on the causes and extent of desertification in the Sahel. The opportunity now presents itself to treat this debate as a historical object lesson in the relationship between science, the formation of public opinion, and international policy-making in the context of climate change. In short, what might the ‘great Sahelian desertification boondoggle’ have to tell us about current attempts to come to grips with climate change?

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.