Ecosystem services are benefits that society receives from landscapes, and can include food, fiber, and wood, the regulation of climate, the pollination of crops, and the provisioning of intellectual inspiration and recreational environments. They usually involve several ecological functions and processes such as primary production and nutrient cycling, and they are intimately inter-related with biological diversity. Ecosystem services are generally classified in four different types: provisioning, supporting, regulating, and cultural, and landscapes have provided this array of goods and services to humans for millennia. Certainly, the emphasis in recent decades has shifted from managing for a sustained supply of ecosystem services to reconciling supplies with competing demands. Land management is increasingly focused on reconciling supply of and demand for ecosystem services among different stakeholders. What has changed is the ecological, social and economic complexities of the competing demands for ecosystem goods and services. This reconciliation is primarily a function of 3 drivers: landscape capacities, socio-economic conditions, and time. Each driver has key gradients that dictate either supply of or demand for ecosystem services, or both. How these various gradients of these drivers interact is a major determinant of ecosystem services supplied from any landscape. Increasingly, land management either influences or is influenced by the interactions of time, landscape ecology, and human demands. Applying principles of land management is only part of the issue in supplying goods and services from rangelands. Understanding these drivers, their gradients and their interactions is critical as we transform and continue the provisioning of ecosystem services from rangelands as both supplies and demands change over time.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.