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Overview

Public lands are lands held in trust by the federal government on behalf of all Americans. The federal government owns roughly 640 million acres, about 28% of the 2.27 billion acres of land in the U.S.Four major federal land management agencies administer 610.1 million acres of this land. They are the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and National Park Service (NPS) in the Department of the Interior (DOI),and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in the Department of Agriculture. In addition, the Department of Defense (excluding the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) administers 11.4 million acres in the United States, consisting of military bases, trainingranges, and more.Most public lands are located in the Western U.S.

Overview

Since the early 1900s, the federal government has regulated the use of forage by domestic livestock on its lands through the issue of grazing permits. These programs are administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Forest Service (USFS), and in the case of some national monuments, the Park Service. As with other users of these lands grazing allotment permittees must comply with federal regulations, including numerous environmental restrictions. These pages review the extent and uses of public lands, the goals of the agencies that manage them and their users, the impacts of grazing, and the laws and regulations meant to reduce potential negative impacts.

This section is generally organized into two major sections:

1. general information about public lands and public lands grazing intended for both the general public and for ranchers who what to know more about the history and characteristics of the public lands grazing system, and

2. information specifically for ranchers who use public lands as a part of their operation; this section is intended to provide the information needed to successfully navigate the NEPA process.

In this section you will find information on the various aspects of rangeland ecology. You will discover how water is the single most important factor determining the type and production of vegetation in a rangeland community. Climate and drought will continue to have a huge impact on rangelands as the global climate trends toward warmer and drier. The most productive sites on rangelands are riparian areas because they are the transition zone between waterways and upland ecosystems. Healthy riparian areas purify water and are a center of diversity for plants and animals and a focal point for recreation. Finally, you will discover how altered fire regimes and undesirable plant and animal species can disrupt the delicate balance of a rangeland community. Understanding the complex relationships between water, vegetation, animals and fire, is the key to rangeland ecology and preserving these valuable landscapes.

Forces that Shape Rangelands

Rangelands are a dynamic landscape, composed of many resources, which produce many products. The rangeland landscape and its resources are constantly being modified by a suite of non-human forces, including: grazing, fire, and climate or weather.

Humans also modify rangelands directly through development (e.g., energy, mining, and transportation and communications infrastructure) and recreation. People also affect the other forces of change by introducing invasive species, controlling or igniting fires, managing grazing and potentially impacting the climate and weather patterns through human caused changes in atmospheric chemistry.

Managers need a way to predict how management practices or natural disturbance will impact the vegetation on rangelands, so they developed State and Transition Models. State and transition models are box-and-arrow diagrams used to describe vegetation change, or plant succession, from a specific disturbance based on the current vegetation community, the soils and climate of a site.

Sustainability of rangelands and the communities that depend on them require that society and the values they place on various goods and services produced from rangelands are considered. In this section, we explore some of the major concepts related to ecosystem services, the land owners who provide them, and the communities where they live. Ecosystem services from rangelands may include forage and habitat for livestock and wildlife, open spaces, water quantity and quality, pollinators, scenic views, spiritual and cultural sites, biodiversity, and many others that society values. While the federal government owns vast areas of western rangeland, ranchers are the largest private landowners of rangelands. Their well-being determines to a large part how rangelands are managed and we as a society benefit based on their management. Communities, where ranchers live and work, also depend on rangelands and affect how rangelands are managed. Everyone in society has a stake in how our rangelands are managed and the goods and services they produce either as a direct or indirect user of what comes from the land.

Written by Aaron Lien, Assistant Research Scientist, School of Natural Resources & the Environment, University of Arizona

Introduction

While implementation of science-based management at the individual ranch scale is necessary to sustain healthy rangelands, ranch-scale stewardship is often not enough to achieve regional ecological, economic, and social goals. Rangelands are complex systems where changes at the ranch level can scale up to impact regional ecological health in expected and unexpected ways. Large landscape conservation is an approach to conservation and management that focuses on actions that are taken across large areas, such as entire watersheds. In contrast to a single ranch, large landscape conservation generally involves many ranchers, other landowners and users, government agencies, and conservation organizations. These different interests come together to identify specific, measurable conservation objectives that will enhance the conservation value of all lands, regardless of owner or use. Major goals of large landscape conservation efforts typically focus on management approaches that require a multi-ownership and multi-jurisdictional approach, such as reintroduction of fire into ecosystems, implementation of climate adaptation initiatives, and controlling development. Large landscape conservation efforts also acknowledge that conservation does not take place in a vacuum and generally seek to address economic and social challenges. In many places, large landscape conservation and related collaborative efforts have emerged as a critical approach to successful rangeland management at the regional scale.

Wildfires rolling across the African savannah. A hunter calling in an elk on a mountain meadow. Mongolian herders gathering their goats for the night. Reindeer herds grazing on the arctic tundra. These are all scenes that could be happening somewhere “out there” in the world’s arid wild lands, also known as rangelands.

Vast natural landscapes in the form of grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, and deserts: rangelands are the wild open spaces that cover about half of the earth’s land. Rangelands are known by many names across the globe including prairies, shrublands, deserts, woodlands, savannas, chaparral, steppe, and tundra.

Rangelands provide a vast array of resources, products and values, including forage for livestock, habitat for wildlife, clean water, renewable energy, recreational opportunities, open space, and magnificent vistas.

Search the Rangelands Gateway database of more than 25,000 resources

Rangelands are important to American Indian and Alaskan Natives with an estimated 46 million acres of rangeland managed by tribes. These landscapes have agricultural, natural resource, and cultural significance. Many unique issues also come up with these indigenous rangelands including conservation of sacred areas, land tenure rights, variation of land title with unique responsibilities and authorities, and cultural uses. Many of these lands occur in the western United States and are a critical resource for indigenous livelihoods and culture but have been neglected with many contemporary issues and legal cases emerging.

Although Indian lands are extensions of neighboring ecological landscapes and watersheds, they are strikingly different politically. Many reservations have several different classes of land title within them that are not managed by a single political entity: Indian title, allotted, federal, and fee simple are examples. Each class of land gives rise to unique responsibilities and authorities. This can make land-based natural resource issues and resulting decisions quite complex.  There are several land-related issues of key interest to American Indians and Alaska Natives today including: (1) sovereignty (2) undivided heirship and fractionated lands; and (3) the conversion of in held fee simple lands to trust lands ("fee to trust").