Plant communities growing on saline soils are severely deteriorated by continuous grazing all around the world. This paper shows that not only permanent exclosure, but also rotational grazing may improve vegetation condition and forage value in the halophytic steppes of the Flooding Pampa of Argentina. Such grazing system promotes the replacement of low forage quality species dominant under continuous grazing by species and functional groups of higher forage quality, some of them dominating in less stressed plant communities.

Pressures on the world’s rangelands are accelerating due to population growth and urban expansion so strategies that preserve crucial landscape services are critical for landscape sustainability. This paper illustrates the need for maintaining vital landscape function through an examination of the role of hydrological features called dambos in the greater Darwin area of Northern Australia. Dambos are grass covered shallow wetlands that are seasonally waterlogged. These features are shown to reduce the amount of sediment ‘runoff’ into Darwin harbour by storage in the catchment and, in demonstrating their role, the importance of incorporating the distribution of such features into planning and design of future rangeland landscapes is presented.

Unmanaged livestock grazing is the greatest threat to the sustainability of forest rangelands. Keeping in mind lessons learned from traditional rules and institutions, the Moroccan Forestry Department carried out a program of compensation to pastoralists in forest areas closed to grazing in an effort to involve communities in forest rangeland management. This participative program helped to develop consensus in a process of ecosystem restoration that will help managers break the vicious cycle of unmanaged grazing, and promote a new collective stewardship of these precious lands.

Biosolids are often applied to rangelands as a restoration tool to improve forage production and plant biomass, but effects on wildlife are largely unknown. We examined how grasshoppers responded to biosolids applied in grasslands; we found large increases in grasshopper abundances, but species richness did not change. These results suggest biosolids could lead to higher abundances of bird and mammal species that consume grasshoppers as major components of the diet.

The best choice for reducing overgrazing is to limit the number of livestock to the livestock carrying capacity of the arid and semiarid grassland. It is necessary to develop a method to accurately predict livestock carrying capacity for such grassland. This research provides a new concept for predicting livestock carrying capacity and can provide valuable guidance for improving the grazing management practices.

Grazing changes the pattern of coexistence among species, but the reasons for these changes are unclear. This study attempts to reveal the changes from the perspective of plant traits. The results indicated that growth-defence trade-off strategies might lead to variations in plant traits and coverage. It appears that the traits allow a species to dominate the community are also the traits that simultaneously make this species more palatable to herbivores.

The relationship between ecosystem diversity and stability is complicated, and the effects of nutrient availability on the relationship are debatable. We studied the effects of diversity indices on community biomass spatial stability following fertiliser application and found that the diversity–stability relationship is context-dependent. It is important to recognise species-specific roles in ecosystems and to consider trait-based approaches to understand community stability.