Unintended habitat loss on private land from grazing restrictions on public rangelands

Abstract

1. Management of public lands, and who should have access to them, is often contentious. Most ranches in the western US rely upon seasonal grazing access to public lands, and conflict over biodiversity management has led to proposals to restrict grazing access on public lands. We evaluate whether grazing restrictions on public rangelands could have the unintended effect of increasing the conversion of private rangeland to cropland, causing habitat loss for sage-grouse, a species of conservation concern.2. Using a model parameterized with empirical observations of land use change and ranch versus cropland profitability, we explore how changes to public lands grazing policy could affect ranch profitability and consequently land use on private lands across the western US.3. We predict that restricting grazing of public lands by 50% would result in the loss of an additional 171,400 ha of sage-grouse habitat on private lands by 2050, on top of the 842,000 ha predicted to be lost under business as usual. Most of this conversion would affect sage-grouse mesic habitat, 75% of which occurs on private land and is vital to the species during brood rearing. Under such policy changes, we estimate that an additional 105,700 ha (3.24%) of sage-grouse mesic habitat held on private land in the study region would be directly lost by 2050, and the cumulative area affected by fragmentation would be much higher. By considering the human and ecological links between public and private land, we show that attempts to improve habitat on public lands via grazing restrictionsThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Cropland expansion in the United States produces marginal yields at high costs to wildlife

“…These results indicate that disproportionately large reductions to breeding habitat and reproductive capacity could be expected with continued cropland expansion. Moreover, this finding substantiates conservation strategies that aim to protect the natural lands at highest risk of conversion in order to maximize wildlife-supporting benefits 29,55,56 . The subset of conversion which occurs on long-term habitat is likely to lead to particularly high losses in native plant diversity, wildlife provisioning, and other ecosystem services 18,19 .…”

The luxury effect beyond cities: bats respond to socioeconomic variation across landscapes

“…Piemonti et al [25] demonstrated that watershed conservation and management actions could be influenced by landowners’ socioeconomic background. Even in protected areas, various land use activities are driven by socioeconomic factors [26], such as exurban housing developments in areas close to nature for the wealthy [27, 28] or cattle grazing on mesic habitats driven by rent economics [29]. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that the luxury effect in urban ecosystems can scale up spatially and be found across landscapes.…”

Valuation of beef cattle ecosystem services An economic valuation of federal and private grazing lands ecosystem services supported by beef cattle ranching in the U.S

“…The impacts per unit area on operators and/or ecosystem services may increase at an increasing rate and at some points may experience large discontinuous jumps in impact. For example, ranchers may go out of business even when a part of their forage base is affected ( Maher et al, 2013 ; Torell et al 2014a ; Runge et al 2019 ). This may make an operator more likely to convert private rangelands or pastures to cropping, or sell them, possibly for development.…”