The link between rangeland health and grazing system was evaluated in communal, small-scale and large-scale commercial farming systems of Zimbabwe. The communal grazing system was the most detrimental management system based on five key indicators. There is need to overhaul the existing communal grazing system in favour of a more sustainable rest-and-rotation system that gives defoliated plants time to recover.

Poorly managed grazing pressure can degrade pastures and cause pastoralists economic hardship. We subjected poplar box and ironbark eucalypt woodlands in the Aristida/Bothriochloa native pasture community in Queensland to four different grazing pressures over 8 years with half the paddocks recently cleared. Increasing grazing pressure reduced pasture mass, pasture crown cover and ground cover, and reduced the proportion of important forages Themeda triandra and Dichanthium sericeum and undesirable Aristida species. Sustained high grazing pressure resulted in poor pasture production and composition.

Natural grasslands of Argentina are the most important source of forage for livestock and seem to be, at first sight, internally homogeneous communities. But these grasslands are actually true mosaics formed by patches of vegetation that get their expression from different factors (some of them from soil characteristics, and others from their hydrodynamics). In areas with relief as subtle as this area, topography per se does not explain the internal heterogeneity of these grasslands, but water is the great modeller of these landscapes.

Rangeland function determination at the sub-basin scale can facilitate and accelerate rangeland management. This study examined the potential of remotely-sensed landscape function indices in semi-arid rangelands in Iran. Our findings highlight that these indices could determine rangeland functionality in sub-basins with different levels of degradation, therefore, they can be used in combination with field methods in future decision-making about rangeland landscapes.

In Mongolia, snow disasters combined with drought in the previous summer, called dzud in Mongolian, are serious threats to the national livestock sector. To mitigate the damage of dzuds, we developed a system to calculate sheep weight from climate and remote sensing data, and applied it to a 2009–2010 dzud. We thereby confirmed that the modelled weight had statistically significant consistency with observed sheep mortality. The system shows strong potential for mitigation of dzud damage.

Poisonous plants have caused increasing economic losses to livestock producers in Xinjiang, a large region in arid north-western China. Species distribution modelling was used to investigate spatial patterns of poisonous plants and assess their future expansion under projected climate change scenarios. Output from the model indicated that four poisonous plant hotspots currently exist in the region and these areas had the highest risk for expansion in the future. Policies that promote monitoring and prevention measures that would reduce future expansion are recommended.

The assessment of the relative roles of climate and human factors in vegetation degradation is important to understand the driving mechanisms of vegetation degradation. This paper showed that both the vegetation degradation and restoration were dominated by human activities compared with climate change. Human activities played a demonstrably positive role in vegetation restoration. This study may be useful for human management of mitigating vegetation degradation and benefit the ecological restoration programmes to contrapuntally implement ecological restoration projects in future.