•Catastrophic wildfires in Texas, from the 2011 Bastrop Complex Fire to the 2024 Panhandle megafires, have accelerated a fundamental shift in public attitudes, demonstrating that proactive prescribed burning is not optional but essential for protecting communities, rural economies, and fire-adapted ecosystems.•A growing network of Prescribed Burn Associations and the Prescribed Burn Alliance of Texas is rebuilding fire culture through neighbor-to-neighbor training, equipment sharing, and legislative advocacy, but uneven geographic coverage, liability concerns, insurance gaps, and limited access to cost-share funding still prevent many landowners from burning as often or as broadly as ecological conditions warrant.•Expanded educational pathways, including AgriLife Extension’s online Prescribed Burn School, the Certified and Insured Prescribed Burn Manager credentialing program, and new interagency coordinator positions, have substantially lowered the barriers to entry for aspiring practitioners, yet an aging practitioner workforce and a shrinking pipeline of new candidates for Certified and Insured Prescribed Burn Managers represent the most consequential long-term threat to Texas’s prescribed fire culture.•Sustaining Texas’s prescribed fire revival requires a deliberate next-generation strategy: structured mentorship programs, municipally embedded wildland fire coordinators modeled on Borger’s success, expanded Texas Department of Transportation right-of-way burning partnerships, and continued federal farm bill advocacy, all that are concrete steps that will determine whether the gains of the past decade outlast the practitioners who achieved them.
•The relative productivity index (RPI) compares observed vegetation productivity with the potential productivity of healthy, undegraded rangelands, estimated from climate, soils, and topography using a machine learning model. This provides a dynamic, data-driven baseline against which vegetation condition can be assessed.•We present an improved RPI version that convincingly outperforms a widely used alternative method (i.e., residual trends analysis) in distinguishing local management impacts from background climate variability in East African rangelands. This improves confidence that detected trends reflect land condition rather than short-term climatic variation.•RPI does not replace ground monitoring but can reveal underlying changes in vegetation condition that are otherwise masked by rainfall and temperature fluctuations. Case studies help clarify how RPI outputs should be interpreted alongside field indicators.•RPI shows limited sensitivity to invasive Neltuma (Prosopis) shrubs, highlighting both the robustness of the metric and the importance of interpreting satellite-based assessments alongside local ecological knowledge.•Because RPI dynamically estimates expected productivity for given climatic and soil conditions, the resulting standardized metric enables direct comparison of rangeland condition across regions and through time, supporting more consistent large-scale monitoring and evaluation of land management.
•Fencing is important for livestock management on rangelands and has proliferated across the western United States.•Traditional fence designs may hinder big game movements, resulting in injuries, entanglements, and death.•Wildlife-friendly fences are designed to enhance big game passage but may reduce containment effectiveness for small-bodied livestock like sheep.•Wildlife-friendly fence designs are widely promoted by conservation agencies but are largely unevaluated for their efficacy in containing livestock, especially smaller species like sheep.•Sheep crossed five of the nine fence designs, but only by one of the four sheep groups; height of the lowest wire strand was a significant predictor of crossing. Crossing events were driven by social dynamics and not forage utilization.
•Rangeland soil seedbanks are crucial to stabilizing plant community composition and maintaining biodiversity, although they can also harbor problematic weeds.•The effects of rangeland management practices on soil seedbanks are associated with, yet distinct from, the effects of these practices on aboveground plant communities.•Livestock grazing impacts seed rain from nearby plants, seed dispersal from neighboring ecosystems, seed persistence in the seedbank, and seed germination.•Prescribed fire impacts seed production, mortality, and germination.•Advances in seedbank measurement and modeling will enable managers to account for seedbank dynamics in the development of precision rangeland management strategies.
•Virtual fencing (VF) shows promise as a tool for managing livestock grazing, but our understanding of potential applications for conservation objectives is limited.•We reviewed the literature to identify current and future applications of VF for conservation and restoration, identifying 18 papers in three main categories: Targeted Livestock Grazing, Restriction of Wildlife Movement, and Livestock Grazing Exclusion.•Research to date indicates VF was highly effective for conservation goals but that containment or exclusion of livestock is typically between 90% and 99%; although these rates are appropriate for many management goals, they may be less tenable for restoration or extremely sensitive conservation areas.•A fourth category, Facilitating Wildlife Movement (through the reduction of physical fences), has received attention from managers, but as yet, no empirical research has evaluated this application.•Future research on the conservation applications of VF could be improved through continued efforts to standardize both metrics evaluating success and terminology, increased spatial and temporal scale of applications, and research focused on potential benefits of VF for wildlife movement.
•Overstocking has been the main cause of grazing land degradation; whereas managed grazing can maintain and promote optimal ecological functioning of grazing lands.•Based on 348 papers published between 2008 and 2024, we did a bibliometric analysis of grazing management across diverse grazing lands.•The number of articles published on grazing management associated with grazing lands has displayed an increasing trend since 2008, with the United States and China contributing the most papers.•The main research topics were range conditions and conservation management between 2010 and 2011, but they shifted to biodiversity and remote sensing between 2021 and 2024. Additionally, soil microbial diversity, carbon sequestration, multifunctionality, and ecological restoration appeared frequently as keywords in 2023 and 2024, while the effects of grazing on biodiversity, plant biomass, and nutrient dynamics in relation to climate change were researched widely.•Today, the keywords of remote sensing and artificial intelligence appeared frequently in papers on grazing management, and their importance will likely increase in the future.
•Carbon contracts have gained attention as a way to incentivize carbon-emissions reduction for the agricultural sector, particularly among beef-cattle producers.•Our study utilized data from a survey of 222 beef cattle producers in the southeastern United States to examine their knowledge, perceptions, and preferences regarding carbon contracts.•Survey respondents demonstrated a lack of accurate knowledge about carbon markets and contract specifications, with many overestimating the price of carbon.•Among the most common barriers to signing contracts were the cost of altering practices, the duration, and insufficient payments.•Further, our results indicated that producers require an additional $103.74/hectare ($42/acre) to accept a 15-year contract compared to a 5-year contract, and they prefer a fixed payment structure, requiring an additional $24.70/hectare ($10/acre) if the contract has a fluctuating price structure.
•Sense of place (SOP) in working landscapes is a conceptual framework that describes how farmers, ranchers, and other land actors connect with the land they operate, including emotional bonds, meanings, functional dependence, and identity shaping.•Nostalgia, a bittersweet emotional reflection on the past, weaves through SOP dimensions and other social-ecological dynamics, intensifying emotional connections, evoking memories, and reinforcing continuity across generations amid environmental and land-use change.•In interviews with Utah ranchers, nostalgia surfaces across place attachment (“inborn connection to the land”), physical identity (“fifth-generation rancher”), social identity (“built on the past for the future”), economic dependence (“farm was making enough to get by”), and place dependence (“now it’s bone dry”), offering a lens into their experience of place.•Rather than a stand-alone SOP dimension, nostalgia functions as a cross-cutting thread linking past and present, emotion to action, and memory to land management, enhancing understanding of ranchers’ relationships with working landscapes. Nostalgia can also enrich other social-ecological research in rangeland, including work on value systems, socioeconomic studies, and succession or transition planning.•Future research could employ multimethod approaches to capture nostalgic elements often overlooked in interviews or surveys and compare how nostalgia shapes SOP across differing land tenures or regional contexts.
•The Lawson Aerator is one of the newer implements used for rangeland improvement practices to treat dense, low, perennial plant diversity communities.•The first case study of mechanical vegetation manipulation using the Lawson Aerator at the Simpson Creek Ranch increased perennial grass forage by >700% while also improving wildlife habitat and use.•The second case study at the Flying M Ranch was unsuccessful in improving herbage for grazing and wildlife resources, likely due to low precipitation and a lack of existing herbaceous understory plants to release.•The third case study at the Buffalo Ranch had the greatest perennial grass densities following mechanical treatment, resulting in a 978% increase in forage production after shrub-control treatment and herbaceous plant release.•The use of the Lawson Aerator as a mechanical manipulation tool, in concert with seeding adaptable perennial grasses, significantly increased sustainable grazing resources while also improving edge effects for wildlife species that increased wildlife use.
•The restoration of native predators across rangelands of the western U.S. has created new challenges for ranchers in the form of direct and indirect predation impacts. We present two case studies, one with sheep and one with cattle, where ranchers responded to increased predation risk by incorporating transitory night penning as a component of their managed grazing on public lands.•For both sheep and cattle, transitory night penning was a technique that reduced predation risk and also aided the goal of managed grazing.•Factors important to transitory night penning include skilled and well-trained personnel, livestock trained to enter and relax in night pens, guard dogs working in conjunction with herders, and occasional use of predator deterrents.•Challenges of transitory night penning include increased logistical and infrastructure demands, higher equipment and labor costs, learning new livestock-handling and training procedures, negative ecological impacts at night-penning sites, and policy/culture discouraging concentrations of livestock on public land.•Benefits of transitory night penning include a reduction in predator-related mortality, positive ecological impacts, an increase in livestock performance, and a reduction in stress for personnel and guard dogs.
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•Cow-calf pairs are exposed to forages of varying nutritive quality during the grazing season, and that is converted to live pounds to determine ranch profitability.•Saccharomyces cerevisiae (CNCM I-1077), a well-documented active dry yeast, improves ruminal fiber digestibility of low- to high-quality forages, thus enhancing forage and rangeland use and animal performance.•We offered 436 multiparous red Angus cows a free-choice mineral supplement with and without the referenced active dry yeast, while they were grazing on native rangeland in Kansas between February and August of 2023.•Cows consuming the active dry yeast mineral supplement had greater body-condition scores and weaned heavier calves compared to cows not consuming the active dry yeast at the time of weaning.•Our data suggest that providing Saccharomyces cerevisiae CNCM I-1077 via a free-choice mineral to grazing cow-calf pairs improves both cow and calf performance and the productivity of native rangeland, resulting in greater returns for cattle producers.
•Lentic riparian meadows provide essential habitat for many wildlife species, including sage-grouse that rely on stored soil water for green forbs in dry summers.•Proper riparian functioning-condition assessment is the first step in integrated riparian management, because many riparian areas are at risk of incision and dehydration.•Free-roaming horses were as much as or more attracted to riparian areas than cattle during the summer growing season. Combined use was impairing riparian functions and dehydrating and shrinking meadows.•The grazing-response index compared grazing effects by focusing on the opportunity to grow or regrow when not being grazed as well as on the frequency and intensity of grazing.•Our results suggest the need for movement of livestock to result in less stress and more recovery by monitoring actual use, including when and where grazing occurs.•Adjusting horse numbers to achieve appropriate management levels is essential to meet the land’s health standards focused on watershed riparian functions.•In many locations, quantitatively monitoring trends in lentic riparian areas will help to adjust appropriate management levels.•Dominance of riparian stabilizers along the greenline or in the vegetated drainageway should be the key indicator focusing the objective.
•Pasture cropping has gained traction in Australia, but it remains a relatively novel idea in the United States.•Farmers who rely on grassland as their primary source of income are more likely to try pasture-cropping practices.•Pasture cropping could provide several key benefits, including improved forage quality, reduced input costs, improved animal health, and enhanced soil health and biodiversity.•The success of pasture cropping is influenced by several factors, including insufficient precipitation, which could pose a substantial challenge for producers in certain regions.•Farmers who received >170 mm of precipitation during the grass dormant season had the highest average success rate of 82% when pasture cropping.
•Preventing grassland biome conversion of the North American Great Plains, improving grassland management, and restoring ecosystem function can be accomplished only through collaborative efforts designed with and in support of the communities on the ground.•World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF’s) The Great Plains Program partners with private landowners and Native Nations to realize a shared vision of maintaining intact and resilient grasslands and communities.•Launched in 2021, the Ranch Systems and Viability Planning (RSVP) network supports a growing network of landowners and managers dependent on grass-based economies, predominantly in livestock production across >110 ranches, totaling >485,622 ha (>1,200,000 acres) in the Northern Great Plains.•RSVP is an enrollment-based program featuring: (1) ranch-wide ecological monitoring (i.e., soil carbon, water infiltration, forage production, and biodiversity); (2) educational opportunities and scholarships; (3) technical assistance for implementing sustainable management practices, including grazing-management plans; (4) financial support (i.e., for ranch infrastructure to improve grazing practices); and (5) peer-to-peer learning and organizational development.•RSVP has been successful because of the relationships and trust built over decades, including funders, landowners, and managers dedicated to conserving the grasslands they call home and make a living from, and the partners working tirelessly across the region.
•In the United States, “Old-World” bluestems – non-native grasses from the genera Bothriochloa and Dichanthium – have become destructive invasive species in rangeland systems due to their aggressive spread, severe negative impacts on local biodiversity, and relatively poor forage value to livestock and native grazers.•Controlling Old-World bluestems is an important ecological and economic priority, but no attempts have been made to quantitatively synthesize the effectiveness of contemporary management practices.•Our objective was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of Old-World bluestem management in the United States, with the goal of identifying practices providing effective control.•Our systematic review included 16 research articles satisfying our search criteria that resulted in 89 observations for meta-analysis. Selected studies were conducted in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.•Burn, herbicide + burn, rain shelter + burn, and competition (e.g., overseeding) treatments significantly improved control of invasive bluestems. Counterintuitively, removal treatments resulted in a significant increase of invasive bluestems. Herbicides used singularly were not effective.•Old-World bluestems pose substantial threats to working ecosystems. Some practices afford effective control, but in general, the practical management of these invasive species is understudied.
