Abstract
Rangelands cover 40–50% of the Earth's terrestrial surface. While often characterized by limited, yet variable resource availability, rangelands are vital for humans, providing numerous ecosystem goods and services. In the conterminous United States (CONUS), the dominant component of rangeland conservation is a network of public rangelands, concentrated in the west. Public rangelands are interspersed with private and tribal rangelands resulting in a complex mosaic of land tenure and management priorities. We quantify ownership patterns of rangeland production at multiple scales across CONUS and find that both total production and average productivity of private rangelands is more than twice that of public and tribal rangelands. At finer scales, private rangelands are consistently more productive than their public counterparts. We also demonstrate an inverse relationship between public rangeland acreage and productivity. While conserving acreage is crucial to rangeland conservation, just as critical are broad‐scale ecological patterns and processes that sustain ecosystem services. Across CONUS, ownership regimes capture distinct elements of these patterns and services, demonstrated through disparate production dynamics. As ownership determines the range of feasible conservation actions, and the technical and financial resources available to implement them, understanding ownership‐production dynamics is critical for effective and sustained conservation of rangeland ecosystem services.
Highlights
Conservation will boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest. —Leopold 1934
As vast acreage of U.S rangelands is in the public domain (~39%) and have been a dominant focus and priority of rangeland conservation (Charnley et al 2014), it is tempting to assume that the socioecological integrity of rangelands is adequately conserved across the conterminous United States (CONUS)
Within CONUS, ~35% of the total land area is rangeland, with 95% of these rangelands occurring in the Great Plains and western United States (Fig. 2)
Summary
Conservation will boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest. —Leopold 1934. In the western United States, large areas with scarce water, poor soils, and rugged terrain were left unsettled and eventually became part of the public domain. Because of this, it has long been surmised, though not quantified, that private rangelands exhibit disproportionately higher vegetation productivity than their public counterparts (Huntsinger and Hopkinson 1996, Knight 2007). In the United States, land ownership largely determines the feasibility of conservation and management actions, and the resources (e.g., technical and financial) available for their implementation. For a cohesive and broad-scale rangeland conservation strategy to materialize, more must be known about the inherent variability in productivity among divergent ownerships
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