Cattle, conservation, and carbon in the western Great Plains

Sanderson, John S.; Beutler, Curtis; Brown, Joel R.; Burke, Indy; Chapman, Teresa B.; Conant, Richard T.; Derner, Justin D.; Easter, Mark; Fuhlendorf, Samuel D.; Grissom, Grady; Liptzin, Daniel; Morgan, Jack A.; Murph, Rachel; Pague, Chris; Rangwala, Imtiaz; Ray, David; Rondeau, Renée Jane; Schulz, T.; Sullivan, Tim

doi:10.2489/jswc.75.1.5a

Cited by 38 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…2010), and levels of cattle grazing (Sanderson et al. 2020). Changing patterns of precipitation and p CO 2 can in turn alter a grassland’s balance of CHOs to other elements (La Pierre et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is especially true as the drivers embedded in our hypotheses are changing. Soil ionomes are altered by changes in atmospheric deposition (Stevens et al 2004), erosion (Quinton et al 2010), and levels of cattle grazing (Sanderson et al 2020). Changing patterns of precipitation and pCO 2 can in turn alter a grassland's balance of CHOs to other elements (La Pierre et al 2016, Knapp et al 2017, Gherardi and Sala 2019, Welti et al 2020b).…”

Section: Caveats and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How and why plant ionomes vary across North American grasslands and its implications for herbivore abundance

Kaspari

Beurs

Welti

2021

Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Plant elemental content can vary up to 1,000‐fold across grasslands, with implications for the herbivores the plants feed. We contrast the regulation, in grasses and forbs, of 12 elements essential to plants and animals (henceforth plant‐essential), 7 essential to animals but not plants (animal‐essential) and 6 with no known metabolic function (nonessential). Four hypotheses accounted for up to two thirds of the variation in grass and forb ionomes across 54 North American grasslands. Consistent with the supply‐side hypothesis, the plant‐essential ionome of both forbs and grasses tracked soil availability. Grass ionomes were more likely to harvest even nonessential elements like Cd and Sr. Consistent with the grazing hypothesis, cattle‐grazed grasslands also accumulated a handful of metals like Cu and Cr. Consistent with the NP‐catalysis hypothesis, increases in the macronutrients N and P in grasses were associated with higher densities of cofactors like Zn and Cu. The plant‐essential elements of forbs, in contrast, consistently varied as per the nutrient‐dilution hypothesis—there was a decrease in elemental parts per million with increasing local carbohydrate production. Combined, these data fit a working hypothesis that grasses maintain lower elemental densities and survive on nutrient‐poor patches by opportunistically harvesting soil nutrients. In contrast, nutrient‐rich forbs use episodes of high precipitation and temperature to build new carbohydrate biomass, raising leaves higher to compete for light, but diluting the nutrient content in every bite of tissue. Herbivores of forbs may thus be particularly prone to increases in pCO2 via nutrient dilution.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Caveats and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

How and why plant ionomes vary across North American grasslands and its implications for herbivore abundance

Kaspari

Beurs

Welti

2021

Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The consideration of low intensity working lands and their role in delivering and protecting ecosystem services could be a major contribution to planning future land use, including the sustainable intensification of agriculture (e.g., Rockström et al, 2017), increasing carbon storage, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (Fargione et al, 2018;Sanderson et al, 2020). Expanding our understanding of the "ecosystem services matrix" of natural habitats combined with working lands allows us to recognize the roles of working lands, such as habitat, for large area-requiring species like top predators.…”

Section: Future Directions and The Case For Working Lands In Ecosystementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regulating services are coincident with supporting services, such as habitat essential to pollinators that, in turn, improve local production-a coupled synergistic relationship (Robertson et al, 2014). Less intensive land uses for cattle production, both rangeland and pastures, also provide wildlife habitat and regulating services of fire and carbon sequestration (Fargione et al, 2018;Sanderson et al, 2020). However, while the land mosaic of low intensity agriculture may provide services, existing configurations of agricultural landscapes are often insufficient to effectively buffer the effects of intensive land uses, as evidenced by the increasing levels of pollution and hypoxia in downstream coastal areas, and the legacy of past fertilizer use in pasture soils that still results in downstream nutrient loading (Zhang et al, 2007;Rabalais et al, 2010;Swain et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

Coffin

Sclater

Swain

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Agriculture and natural systems interweave in the southeastern US, including Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, where topographic, edaphic, hydrologic, and climatic gradients form nuanced landscapes. These are largely working lands under private control, comprising mosaics of timberlands, grazinglands, and croplands. According to the “ecosystem services” framework, these landscapes are multifunctional. Generally, working lands are highly valued for their provisioning services, and to some degree cultural services, while regulating and supporting services are harder to quantify and less appreciated. Trade-offs and synergies exist among these services. Regional ecological assessments tend to broadly paint working lands as low value for regulating and supporting services. But this generalization fails to consider the complexity and tight spatial coupling of land uses and land covers evident in such regions. The challenge of evaluating multifunctionality and ecosystem services is that they are not spatially concordant. While there are significant acreages of natural systems embedded in southeastern working lands, their spatial characteristics influence the balance of tradeoffs between ecosystem services at differing scales. To better understand this, we examined the configuration of working lands in the southeastern US by comparing indicators of ecosystem services at multiple scales. Indicators included measurements of net primary production (provisioning), agricultural Nitrogen runoff (regulating), habitat measured at three levels of land use intensity, and biodiversity (supporting). We utilized a hydrographic and ecoregional framework to partition the study region. We compared indicators aggregated at differing scales, ranging from broad ecoregions to local landscapes focused on the USDA Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network sites in Florida and Georgia. Subregions of the southeastern US differ markedly in contributions to overall ecosystem services. Provisioning services, characterized by production indicators, were very high in northern subregions of Georgia, while supporting services, characterized by habitat and biodiversity indicators, were notably higher in smaller subregions of Florida. For supporting services, the combined contributions of low intensity working lands with embedded natural systems made a critical difference in their regional evaluation. This analysis demonstrated how the inclusion of working lands combined with examining these at different scales shifted our understanding of ecosystem services trade-offs and synergies in the southeastern United States.

show abstract

“…In California's rangelands -which typically receive minimal inputs like irrigation and fertilizer -livestock grazing is the dominant land use and is therefore one of the most readily available management tools for landowners (Huntsinger et al 2010). The ability of grazing to influence ecosystem outcomes particularly in water-limited systems is an area of active debate (Booker et al 2013;Sanderson et al 2020;Stanton et al 2018;Teague et al 2013). However, grazing management has been shown through meta-analysis to alter soil properties such as soil C, total N and bulk density globally (Abdalla et al 2018;Byrnes et al 2018) and plant community dynamics regionally (Stahlheber and D'Antonio 2013).…”

Section: Grazing: Soil Texture Affects Response Of Soil Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting evidence varies for rangeland management practices that seek to improve soil properties and forage production in California

Carey¹,

Gravuer²,

Gennet³

et al. 2020

Calif Agr

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

California is increasingly investing in policies and programs that promote soil stewardship on natural and working lands as a way to help achieve multiple goals, including improved forage production and climate change mitigation. To inform the growing expectations for rangeland management activities to promote such services, we conducted an evidence synthesis assessing how four commonly suggested practices (silvopasture, prescribed grazing, compost application and riparian restoration) affect a suite of soil properties and plant-related metrics throughout the state. We extracted data on soil properties that are potentially responsive to management and relevant to soil health. We also extracted data on aboveground forage production, forage nitrogen content and herbaceous species richness. Our search resulted in 399 individual soil observations and 64 individual plant observations. We found that the presence of oaks had the largest effects on soil properties, with soil organic carbon, microbial biomass and other measures of soil fertility increasing beneath oak canopies. The presence of grazing increased compaction and total nitrogen, and decreased pH. Compost applications did not significantly affect any of the measured soil properties, but did boost forage production. Due to a lack of published data, we were unable to characterize the influence of rangeland riparian restoration on any of the soil or plant metrics in our review.

show abstract

Cattle, conservation, and carbon in the western Great Plains

Cited by 38 publications

References 48 publications

How and why plant ionomes vary across North American grasslands and its implications for herbivore abundance

How and why plant ionomes vary across North American grasslands and its implications for herbivore abundance

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

Supporting evidence varies for rangeland management practices that seek to improve soil properties and forage production in California

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About