Effects of grazing management on spatio-temporal heterogeneity of soil carbon and greenhouse gas emissions of grasslands and rangelands: Monitoring, assessment and scaling-up

A - Papers appearing in refereed journals

Wang, J., Li, Y., Bork, E. W., Richter, G. M., Chen, C., Hamid, S., Shah, H. and Mezbahuddin, S. 2021. Effects of grazing management on spatio-temporal heterogeneity of soil carbon and greenhouse gas emissions of grasslands and rangelands: Monitoring, assessment and scaling-up. Journal of Cleaner Production. 288 (15 March), p. 125737. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.125737

AuthorsWang, J., Li, Y., Bork, E. W., Richter, G. M., Chen, C., Hamid, S., Shah, H. and Mezbahuddin, S.
Abstract

Grazing lands provide many goods and ecosystem services, such as forage, livestock, soil carbon (C) storage, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities. Ensuring the long-term sustainability of grazing lands requires optimal management to simultaneously balance livestock productivity for sustaining human food and nutritional demands while reducing environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and soil degradation. In this paper, we revisit grazing management in grazing lands exposed to different grazing systems. In Section 2, we briefly review parameterization and multi-faceted goals for sustainability of grazing systems considering broader sustainability from economic to environmental aspects. We also discuss the inconsistencies between grazing researchers and ranchers’ practices. In Section 3, we review the separate experimental data to examine the impacts of multi-paddock rotational grazing on soil carbon, nutrient and GHGs. In Section 4, we present status and upcoming challenges in monitoring and upscaling of grazing ecosystem research and management. In Section 5, new concepts of multiple source monitoring networks are presented that enable the analysis of scale-dependent processes. Finally, we point out future directions for monitoring and assessment of managing soil C and GHG emissions from grazing lands. The results show that the inconsistences are essentially due to (1) effects of spatiotemporal scales on both economic and ecological outcomes, and (2) simplistic representations of multi-faceted grazing systems and sustainability. The development of multi-faceted monitoring systems needs to be further parametrized and standardized to make consistent for meaningful and comparable assessment of grazing management impacts on SOC and GHGs.

KeywordsGrazing grassland; Grazing management; Rangelands; Agroecosystem; Soil carbon; Nutrient cycles; GHGs
Year of Publication2021
JournalJournal of Cleaner Production
Journal citation288 (15 March), p. 125737
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.125737
Open accessPublished as non-open access
FunderBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Funder project or codeS2N - Soil to Nutrition [ISPG]
Output statusPublished
Publication dates
Online29 Dec 2020
Publication process dates
Accepted27 Dec 2020
PublisherElsevier Sci Ltd
ISSN0959-6526

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