The LTAR Grazing Land Common Experiment at the Central Plains Experimental Range: Collaborative adaptive rangeland management

作者：David J. Augustine, Justin Derner, Lauren M. Porensky, David L. Hoover, John P. Ritten, Sean P. Kearney, Liwang Ma, Dannele E. Peck, Hailey Wilmer, the CARM Stakeholder Group · 发表于：Journal of Environmental Quality · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1002/jeq2.20599 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Rangeland and Wildlife Management、Forest Management and Policy、Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

Semiarid rangelands throughout the western Great Plains support livestock production and many other ecosystem services. The degree to which adaptive multi-paddock (AMP) grazing management approaches can help achieve desired ecosystem services remains unclear. At the Central Plains Experimental Range in northeastern Colorado, a management-science partnership with a diverse stakeholder group is comparing collaborative adaptive rangeland management (CARM), designed to incorporate AMP principles, to traditional rangeland management (TRM), consisting of season-long grazing during the growing season. Each treatment was implemented on a set of 10, 130-ha pastures paired by soils, topography, and plant communities to evaluate how CARM affects vegetation (composition and production), livestock production (steer weight gain), and wildlife habitat (vegetation structure for grassland birds). For the first 5 years of the experiment, CARM cattle were managed as a single herd using AMP grazing with planned year-long rest in 20% of the pastures. Relative to TRM, CARM enhanced heterogeneity in vegetation structure across the landscape, benefiting two grassland bird species. However, this came at the cost of 12%-16% lower steer weight gains in CARM versus TRM and declining populations of a third bird species of conservation concern in both treatments. Here we discuss how increased understanding of ecological and social processes during the experiment's first 5 years led to changes in the CARM ...