Grazing management impacts on ecosystem services under contrasting climatic conditions in Texas and North Dakota.

Grazing management is an important factor affecting the delivery of ecosystem services at the watershed scale. Moreover, characterizing the impacts of climate variation on water resources is essential in managing rangelands. In this study, the effects of alternative grazing management scenarios on provisioning, regulating, and supporting services were assessed in two watersheds with contrasting climates; the Lower Prairie Dog Town Fork Red River (LPDTFR) Watershed in North Texas and the Apple Watershed in South Dakota. The impacts of heavy stocking continuous grazing, light stocking continuous grazing, Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing, and an ungrazed exclosure were compared using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. Our results indicate that the quantity of snow and timing of snow melt substantially influenced grazing management effects on ecosystem services in the Apple Watershed. In contrast, precipitation was the main factor influencing these effects in the LPDTFR Watershed because it highly affected the variation in water cycling, streamflow, sediment, and nutrient controls. Simulated results indicated that AMP grazing was the optimal grazing management approach for enhancing water conservation and ecosystem services in both watersheds regardless of climatic conditions. The Apple Watershed, which is a snow-dominated watershed, exhibited greater ecosystem service improvements under AMP grazing (50.6%, 58.7%, 74.4%, 61.5% and 72.6% reduction in surface runoff, streamflow, and sediment, total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) losses, respectively as compared to HC grazing) than the LPDTFR Watershed (46.0%, 22.8%, 34.1%, 18.9% and 38.4% reduction in surface runoff, streamflow, and sediment, TN and TP losses, respectively). Our results suggest that improved grazing management practices enhance ecosystem services and water catchment functions in rangeland-dominated areas, especially in colder climates.

A Process-Oriented Model of Decision-Making toward Landscape-Scale Prescribed Fire Implementation in the Southern Great Plains, USA.

In this investigation, we developed a model of the psychological drivers of landowners' decisions to implement prescribed fire on their properties. The Southern Great Plains in the USA evolved with fire and prescribed fire is an important management tool aimed at maintaining and enhancing ecological and economic resilience in the region. The conceptualized model is reflective of a decision-making paradigm that considers decision making to be a process inclusive of a variety of factors and their inter-relationships to arrive at judgments on whether or not to utilize prescribed fire. The approach considered a spectrum of inputs, obstacles, and their associations to capture the complexity of decision making that is often lost when modeling single factors in dynamic social-ecological settings. Further, we considered the decision to use prescribed fire as a multifactor process that incorporates not only individual barriers to fire implementation but inter-barrier associations and other inputs (e.g., sociodemographic variables). Path analysis revealed five statistically significant relationships within the hypothesized model. For prescribed fire decision making, women tended to be more analytical whereas men were more inclined to rely on heuristics. Additionally, those who indicated owning their property for non-consumptive recreation-related reasons were also more inclined to rely upon heuristics. Texans reported more experience with prescribed fire as did respondents who indicated owning property for livestock product. Alternately, those owning their property for an investment and non-consumptive recreation opportunities reported less experience with prescribed fire. Last, ownership for crop and livestock production was positively associated with past wildfire experience. Findings have implications for three issue areas: (1) the provision of an evolved conceptualization through which prescribed fire implementation decisions can be examined, (2) enhancing the approach of prescribed fire outreach to a changing landowner population, and (3) improving the content and delivery of prescribed fire education efforts.

Landowner perceptions of woody plants and prescribed fire in the Southern Plains, USA.

Grassland environments face a number of threats including land use change, changing climate and encroachment of woody plants. In the Southern Plains of the United States, woody plant encroachment threatens traditional agricultural grazing economies in addition to grassland dependent wildlife species. Numerous studies have examined the physical drivers of conversion from grassland to woodland but social drivers may be equally important to understanding the causes of and prescriptions for environmental degradation. In this paper, we report the results of a survey of landowners in the Southern Plains of Texas and Oklahoma in which we asked participants to estimate the current amount of woody plant cover on their land, their preferred amount of woody plant cover and about their perspectives regarding the use of prescribed fire for managing woody plants. Prescribed fire is ecologically and economically one of the most effective tools for maintaining grasslands but many landowners do not use this tool due to lack of knowledge, lack of resources and concerns over safety and legal liability. We found that while most of our respondents did express a desire for less woody plant cover on their land, woody plant preference did not affect landowner's use of prescribed fire. However, belonging to a prescribed burn association and owning larger properties were correlated with increased use of prescribed fire. Woody plant cover preference was significantly influenced by landownership motivations, with hunters and other recreational motivated landowners preferring more trees and ranchers preferring fewer. This is important because throughout most of our study area, there has been a steady shift from agricultural production to amenity or recreational landownership, a trend that may undermine efforts to restore or maintain open grasslands. Future outreach efforts to promote prescribed fire to maintain grasslands should more actively support prescribed burn associations, which is an effective vehicle for increasing prescribed fire use by private landowners.

Coerced resilience in fire management.

Mechanisms underlying the loss of ecological resilience and a shift to an alternate regime with lower ecosystem service provisioning continues to be a leading debate in ecology, particularly in cases where evidence points to human actions and decision-making as the primary drivers of resilience loss and regime change. In this paper, we introduce the concept of coerced resilience as a way to explore the interplay among social power, ecological resilience, and fire management, and to better understand the unintended and undesired regime changes that often surprise ecosystem managers and governing officials. Philosophically, coercion is the opposite of freedom, and uses influence or force to gain compliance among local actors. The coercive force imposed by societal laws and policies can either enhance or reduce the potential to manage for essential structures and functions of ecological systems and, therefore, can greatly alter resilience. Using a classical fire-dependent regime shift from North America (tallgrass prairie to juniper woodland), and given that coercion is widespread in fire management today, we quantify relative differences in resilience that emerge in a policy-coerced fire system compared to a theoretical, policy-free fire system. Social coercion caused large departures in the fire conditions associated with alternative grassland and juniper woodland states, and the potential for a grassland state to emerge to dominance became increasingly untenable with fire as juniper cover increased. In contrast, both a treeless, grassland regime and a co-dominated grass-tree regime emerged across a wide range of fire conditions in the absence of policy controls. The severe coercive forcing present in fire management in the Great Plains, and corresponding erosion of grassland resilience, points to the need for transformative environmental governance and the rethinking of social power structures in modern fire policies.

Social segregation of ecosystem services delivery in the San Antonio region, Texas, through 2050.

Inequality in access to ecosystem services is inextricably linked with environmental justice in socially heterogeneous urban settings. Historically, San Antonio has been the gateway to Mexico and is strategically located along the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) corridor. It is also characterized by some of the most distinct residential segregation among U.S. cities. However, little is understood about the ways in which historically institutionalized residential segregation initiated by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and NAFTA have affected socio-ecological outcomes. Here, this paper presents a novel empirical study of racial residential segregation. The study utilizes quantitative and spatially explicit estimates of regulating ecosystem services and biodiversity, and links the supply of ecosystem services to the distribution of human well-being within a heterogeneous social-ecological system. Specifically, the paper employed 1930s HOLC redlining maps and applied the ceteris paribus approach for racial concentrations to reflect a historical legacy and path dependence by institutional inertia. The results point to the social-ecological divide in that Hispanic and African American minorities derive fewer ecosystem benefits and face greater health risks and socio-economic disadvantages (p < 0.01). Notably, NAFTA corridor-related health risks are the most significant for the Hispanic population (p < 0.01). These patterns are likely to persist and may be amplified by 2050 (adjusted R2 = 0.646). The findings highlight that institutional transformations are essential for the greater social-ecological equity in the San Antonio region under NAFTA and, potentially, new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Additionally, by assessing the EJ implications of spatially heterogeneous distribution of ecosystem services supply, the paper provides methodology that enhances science-based planning and better environmental decision-making to avoid or mitigate social-ecological divides in rapidly urbanizing regions both in the U.S. and around the world.

Spatial and temporal changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services in the San Antonio River Basin, Texas, from 1984 to 2010.

A fundamental premise of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is that biodiversity and ecosystem services are key determinants of long-term sustainability of social-ecological systems. With a continuing decline in local and global biodiversity and ecosystem services, it is crucial to understand how biodiversity and various ecosystem services interact and how land change may modify these interactions over time. However, few studies have been conducted to quantify these relationships. In this study, we present the first empirical comparative results to analyze how spatial associations between biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) changed at multiple scales between 1984 and 2010 in the rapidly urbanizing San Antonio River Basin (SARB), Texas, USA. We found statistically significant positive spatial associations among biodiversity, carbon storage, and sediment retention both in the entire SARB and the urban watersheds in Bexar County. Overall, biodiversity and carbon storage declined across the SARB, while sediment retention remained relatively stable. Moreover, the rates of biodiversity loss and carbon storage degradation were negatively related to the urban expansion and have accelerated since the inception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. During the pre- and post-NAFTA periods (1984-1995 and 1995-2010, respectively) the rates of biodiversity loss increased from 0.7% to 0.9%, and the rates of carbon-storage loss increased from 0.1% to 1.4% per annum in the urban watersheds. Our hotspot analyses indicate that the upstream watersheds in the Basin, which supply water to the critically important Edwards Aquifer, should be targeted for priority conservation to mitigate the adverse impacts of land change on BES. Our results suggest the strong need for green infrastructure policies that integrate biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of multiple ecosystem services to address the environmentally deleterious impacts of the extensive land change under the NAFTA and to ensure the long-term social-ecological sustainability of the rapidly urbanizing SARB.

State of knowledge about energy development impacts on North American rangelands: An integrative approach.

To reduce dependence on foreign oil reserves, there has been a push in North America to develop alternative domestic energy resources. Relatively undeveloped renewable energy resources include biofuels and wind and solar energy, many of which occur predominantly on rangelands. Rangelands are also key areas for natural gas development from shales and tight sand formations. Accordingly, policies aimed at greater energy independence are likely to affect the delivery of crucial ecosystem services provided by rangelands. Assessing and dealing with the biophysical and socio-economic effects of energy development on rangeland ecosystems require an integrative and systematic approach that is predicated on a broad understanding of diverse issues related to energy development. In this article, we present a road map for developing an integrative assessment of energy development on rangelands in North America. We summarize current knowledge of socio-economic and biophysical aspects of rangeland based energy development, and we identify knowledge gaps and monitoring indicators to fill these knowledge gaps.

Landowner Satisfaction with the Wetland Reserve Program in Texas: A Mixed-Methods Analysis.

Using mail survey data and telephone interviews, we report on landowner satisfaction with permanent easements held by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) throughout Texas. This study found that landowners were dissatisfied with the NRCS Wetland Reserve Program (WRP), conflicting with results of previous studies. The objective of this study was to explore specific reasons for frustration expressed by landowners with the program. We found three predominant themes underpinning program dissatisfaction: (1) upfront restoration failures, (2) overly restrictive easement constraints, and (3) bureaucratic hurdles limiting landowners' ability to conduct adaptive management on their easement property. The implications of this study suggest that attitudes of landowners participating in the WRP may limit the long-term effectiveness of this program. Suggestions for improving the program include implementing timely, ecologically sound restoration procedures and streamlining and simplifying the approval process for management activity requests. In addition, the NRCS should consider revising WRP restriction guidelines in order to provide more balance between protection goals and landowner autonomy.

Legal barriers to effective ecosystem management: exploring linkages between liability, regulations, and prescribed fire.

Resistance to the use of prescribed fire is strong among many private land managers despite the advantages it offers for maintaining fire-adapted ecosystems. Even managers who are aware of the benefits of using prescribed fire as a management tool avoid using it, citing potential liability as a major reason for their aversion. Recognizing the importance of prescribed fire for ecosystem management and the constraints current statutory schemes impose on its use, several states in the United States have undertaken prescribed burn statutory reform. The stated purpose of these statutory reforms, often called "right to burn" or "prescribed burning" acts, is to encourage prescribed burning for resource protection, public safety, and land management. Our research assessed the consequences of prescribed burn statutory reform by identifying legal incentives and impediments to prescribed fire application for ecosystem restoration and management, as well as fuel reduction. Specifically, we explored the relationship between prescribed burning laws and decisions made by land managers by exploiting a geographic-based natural experiment to compare landowner-prescribed fire use in contiguous counties with different regulations and legal liability standards. Controlling for potentially confounding variables, we found that private landowners in counties with gross negligence liability standards burn significantly more hectares than those in counties with simple negligence standards (F6,72 = 4.16, P = 0.046). There was no difference in hectares burned on private land between counties with additional statutorily mandated regulatory requirements and those requiring only a permit to complete a prescribed burn (F6,72 = 1.42, P = 0.24) or between counties with burn ban exemptions for certified prescribed burn managers and those with no exemptions during burn bans (F6,72 = 1.39, P = 0.24). Lawmakers attempting to develop prescribed burning statutes to promote the safe use of prescribed fire should consider the benefits of lower legal liability standards in conjunction with regulatory requirements that promote safety for those managing forests and rangelands with fire. Moreover, ecologists and land managers might be better prepared and motivated to educate stakeholder groups who influence prescribed fire policies if they are cognizant of the manner in which policy regulations and liability concerns create legal barriers that inhibit the implementation of effective ecosystem management strategies.

Perpetual conservation easements and landowners: evaluating easement knowledge, satisfaction and partner organization relationships.

Conservation easements are being more widely used to facilitate permanent land conservation. While landowners who initially place a conservation easement on their land are generally highly motivated to protect the conservation values of their land, changes in landownership may hinder long-term active landowner support for these easements. Maintaining such support is critical for ensuring their effectiveness as a conservation tool. Our research reports on results from a mail survey sent to landowners in Texas who own property encumbered with perpetual conservation easements. They were asked about their level of satisfaction concerning their conservation easement and the relationship with their easement holder. Additionally, landowners were asked how well they remembered and understood the terms of their conservation easement. We also examined institutional aspects of easement holding organizations and variables associated with landownership that affected these attitudes. Among institutional factors, frequency of contact between landowners and easement holders and the category of agency (federal, state and local or non-governmental agency) were significant in determining level of satisfaction with the easement and perceived relationship with the easement holder. Landowner factors affecting these same issues included easement grantor or successive generation landowner, gender and motivations driving landownership. We did not find any significant variables related to landowners' knowledge about their easement. Management implications from this study suggest that easement holders should increase staff capacity capable of providing targeted landowner technical assistance and outreach beyond compliance monitoring. Additionally, landownership motivations should be considered by easement holders when deciding whether to accept an easement. Finally, expressed dissatisfaction with federal governmental easement holding institutions should be explored further.

Changing landowners, changing ecosystem? Land-ownership motivations as drivers of land management practices.

Motivations for owning rural land are shifting from an agricultural-production orientation to a preference for natural and cultural amenities. Resultant changes in land management have significant implications for the type and distribution of landscape-level disturbances that affect the delivery of ecosystem services. We examined the relationship between motivations for owning land and the implementation of conservation land management practices by landowners in the Southern Great Plains of the United States. Using a mail survey, we classified landowners into three groups: agricultural production, multiple-objective, and lifestyle-oriented. Cross tabulations of landowner group with past, current, and future use of 12 different land management practices (related to prescribed grazing, vegetation management, restoration, and water management) found that lifestyle-oriented landowners were overall less likely to adopt these practices. To the degree that the cultural landscape of rural lands transitions from production-oriented to lifestyle-oriented landowners, the ecological landscape and the associated flow of ecosystem services will likely change. This poses new challenges to natural resource managers regarding education, outreach, and policy; however, a better understanding about the net ecological consequences of lower rates of adoption of conservation management practices requires consideration of the ecological tradeoffs associated with the changing resource dependency of rural landowners.

The role of prescribed burn associations in the application of prescribed fires in rangeland ecosystems.

Risk and liability concerns regarding fire affect people's attitudes toward fire and have led to human-induced alterations of fire regimes. This has, in turn, contributed to brush encroachment and degradation of many grasslands and savannas. Efforts to successfully restore such degraded ecosystems at the landscape scale in regions of the United States with high proportions of private lands require the reintroduction of fire. Prescribed Burn Associations (PBA) provide training, equipment, and labor to apply fire safely, facilitating the application of this rangeland management tool and thereby reducing the associated risk. PBAs help build networks and social capital among landowners who are interested in using fire. They can also change attitudes toward fire and enhance the social acceptability of using prescribed fire as a management practice. PBAs are an effective mechanism for promoting the widespread use of prescribed fire to restore and maintain the biophysical integrity of grasslands and savannas at the landscape scale. We report findings of a project aimed at determining the human dimensions of using prescribed fire to control woody plant encroachment in three different eco-regions of Texas. Specifically, we examine membership in PBAs as it relates to land manager decisions regarding the use of prescribed fire. Perceived risk has previously been identified as a key factor inhibiting the use of prescribed fire by landowners. Our results show that perceived constraints, due to lack of skill, knowledge, and access to equipment and membership in a PBAs are more important factors than risk perceptions in affecting landowner decisions about the use of fire. This emphasizes the potential for PBAs to reduce risk perceptions regarding the application of prescribed fire and, therefore, their importance for restoring brush-encroached grasslands and savannas.

Factors related to spatial patterns of rural land fragmentation in Texas.

Fragmentation of family-owned farms and ranches has been identified as the greatest single threat to wildlife habitat, water supply, and the long-term viability of agriculture in Texas. However, an integrative framework for insights into the pathways of land use change has been lacking. The specific objectives of the study are to test the hypotheses that the nonagricultural value (NAV) of rural land is a reliable indicator of trends in land fragmentation and that NAV in Texas is spatially correlated with population density, and to explore the idea that recent changes in property size patterns are better represented by a categorical model than by one that reflects incremental changes. We propose that the State-and-Transition model, developed to describe the dynamics of semi-arid ecosystems, provides an appropriate conceptual framework for characterizing categorical shifts in rural property patterns. Results suggest that changes in population density are spatially correlated with NAV and farm size, and that rural property size is spatially correlated with changes in NAV. With increasing NAV, the proportion of large properties tends to decrease while the area represented by small properties tends to increase. Although a correlation exists between NAV and population density, it is the trend in NAV that appears to be a stronger predictor of land fragmentation. The empirical relationships established herein, viewed within the conceptual framework of the State-and-Transition model, can provide a useful tool for evaluating land use policies for maintaining critical ecosystem services delivered from privately owned land in private land states, such as Texas.