Adaptive grazing management in semiarid rangelands: An outcome-driven focus

Abstract

Adaptive management should explicitly involve stakeholders, emphasize multiple iterations of identifying and prioritizing outcomes, and tightly link science-informed monitoring to decision-making benchmarks for effective feedback loops. Short-term monitoring procedures should be simple, quick, and based on consistent methods that are focused on locations where meaningful change is expected or uncertainty is high. Long-term monitoring procedures should emphasize consistent methodology across years that provides broader ecosystem context for multiple ecosystem services (e.g., watershed protection and grassland bird habitat). Incorporating timely feedback from monitoring improves the capacity for rapid decision-making when benchmarks are attained and management should be modified.