Maintaining biological diversity of rangelands is an important and appropriate land management objective. The Linebery Policy Center for Natural Resource Management supports research, education, and development of management approaches that address and facilitate biological diversity (i.e., biodiversity) in rangeland ecosystems. This requires an understanding of what biodiversity is and the processes that contribute to biodiversity and its maintenance on rangelands, and development of strategies that can maintain all relevant ecological processes that support healthy rangelands and all the products and attributes of healthy rangelands, including biodiversity.
Maintaining or creating vegetation heterogeneity at both pasture and landscape scales is the key to healthy rangelands and biodiversity. Any attempt to impose a static management paradigm on rangeland will ultimately result in decreased biodiversity and other products of healthy rangelands because such an approach fights the ecological processes that controlled the development of North American grasslands (Ryan, 1990; Fuhlendorf and Engle, 2001, 2004; Derner et al., 2009). This is true whether the static management is intended to benefit a species of concern by conserving some preferred ecological state, or whether it results from desires for uniform use of rangelands by livestock.
Numerous examples exist of grazing benefiting a broad array of wildlife species. While we highlight several examples because this issue is frequently ignored in the antigrazing literature, we urge readers to reject the static management paradigm that featured species management invariably leads to. Rather than focusing on needs of individual species, the focus should be on maintaining the ecological processes that developed the rangelands of North America, including herbivory and fire (Ryan, 1990; Fuhlendorf and Engle, 2001, 2004). Focusing on featured species rather than ecological processes can lead to unnecessary conflicts when multiple rare species occupy the same ecological sites but require radically different structures or ecological states (see below). Moreover, trying to benefit a featured species by maintaining a site in the same ecological state in perpetuity is a futile battle against nature (Hart, 2001; Fuhlendorf and Engle, 2004; Derner et al., 2009). Rather, management should strive to maintain the ecological processes that create varying ecological states across pastures and landscapes, and embrace the variability in disturbance and other processes that change existing states to other ecological states (Ryan, 1990; Fuhlendorf and Engle, 2001, 2004; Gillson, 2004). These same processes, if conserved, would concurrently be recreating these altered states at other sites on the landscape, conserving all habitat features (e.g., Bormann and Likens, 1981; Fuhlendorf and Engle, 2004; Gillson, 2004).
Livestock grazing is not inherently incompatible with maintenance of biodiversity. However, maintaining or creating vegetation heterogeneity at both pasture and landscape scales is key to healthy rangelands and biodiversity. This requires maintaining the ecological processes that shaped the rangelands of North America, including grazing, in order to maintain the health and productivity (for all products) of rangelands. To summarize...
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