Published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, the research by Şahin Palta, Eren Baş, and Zekeriya Yavaşcı of Bartın University examined AMF spore density, community composition, and rhizosphere soil properties across five plant families in a natural rangeland. The findings challenge the assumption that soil chemistry alone dictates which mycorrhizal fungi thrive where. Instead, plant family identity emerges as a decisive driver, shaping fungal abundance and diversity in patterns that could reshape how we manage rangelands worldwide.

The numbers tell a dramatic story. AMF spore density peaked in soils beneath Asteraceae, the daisy family, at 609.8 spores per 50 grams of soil. At the opposite extreme, Urticaceae, the nettle family, hosted just 77.6 spores per 50 grams, a nearly eightfold difference. That gap is not a minor variation; it suggests that the plant above ground exerts a powerful influence on the reproductive output of fungi below, possibly through differences in root architecture, carbon allocation, or the chemical signals each family releases into the rhizosphere.

Correlation analysis added another layer of intrigue. AMF spore density showed a positive association with soil pH (r = 0.47), hinting that slightly alkaline conditions favor sporulation. But the fungi responded negatively to electrical conductivity (r = −0.49), available potassium (r = −0.44), and total nitrogen (r = −0.40). In other words, richer soils with more nitrogen and potassium actually hosted fewer spores. This counterintuitive pattern aligns with a growing body of evidence that mycorrhizal fungi invest less in reproduction when plants, flush with nutrients, depend less on fungal partners for mineral acquisition.

Five fungal species appeared in the rhizosphere soils of all five plant families: Acaulospora tuberculata, Claroideoglomus etunicatum, Funneliformis geosporum, Glomus sp., and Rhizophagus clarus. Their broad distribution across host groups suggests these are generalist symbionts, capable of partnering with a wide range of plants. Yet the study also found that community structure varied among plant families, indicating that host identity filters which species dominate even when the same core species are present everywhere.

Diversity metrics revealed further complexity. Species richness was highest in Urticaceae, despite that family hosting the fewest spores overall. Shannon diversity and evenness peaked in Lamiaceae, the mint family. Fabaceae and Asteraceae showed lower diversity values, and Jaccard similarity was highest between Fabaceae and Asteraceae, meaning their fungal communities overlapped more than any other pair. These patterns suggest that plant family identity shapes not just how many fungi are present, but which species coexist and how evenly they are distributed.

Soil organic carbon, total nitrogen, available potassium, and CaCO₃ content also varied among the sampled plant groups, reinforcing the idea that each plant family modifies its own rhizosphere environment. These modifications, in turn, feed back into fungal community dynamics. The result is a complex interplay between biotic and abiotic factors, where plant identity and soil chemistry jointly determine the belowground fungal landscape.

The implications extend far beyond Turkish rangelands. Mycorrhizal fungi are increasingly recognized as critical components of belowground biotic networks, influencing plant productivity, soil carbon sequestration, and ecosystem resilience. If plant family identity drives fungal community structure, then shifts in vegetation composition, whether from grazing, climate change, or land-use conversion, could cascade through soil food webs in unpredictable ways. Rangeland managers may need to consider not just which plants are present, but which families, to maintain healthy fungal communities.

The study also highlights the value of natural rangelands as living laboratories for understanding mycorrhizal ecology. Unlike agricultural systems, where fertilization and tillage disrupt soil structure, natural rangelands preserve the intricate relationships between plants and fungi that have evolved over millennia. By sampling across five plant families in a single rangeland, the researchers isolated the effect of host identity from broader environmental gradients, offering a cleaner test of how plant families shape their fungal partners.

As climate change and land degradation threaten rangelands globally, understanding the drivers of mycorrhizal fungal communities becomes ever more urgent. This study adds a crucial piece to the puzzle: the plant family above ground is not a passive backdrop but an active architect of the fungal world below. The next chapter in this research will likely explore the mechanisms behind these patterns, from root exudates to carbon allocation, unlocking new strategies for restoring degraded soils and sustaining the invisible partnerships that keep rangelands alive.

One reason spore counts offer such a revealing window into mycorrhizal ecology is that spores are not simply byproducts of fungal activity but the principal propagules through which many AMF species persist between growing seasons and disperse to new hosts. A spore is a thick-walled resting structure, often packed with lipid reserves, that can survive in soil for months or years until favorable conditions and a suitable host root coincide. When researchers count spores in a soil sample, they are therefore measuring not just fungal presence but the accumulated reproductive investment of the fungal community over time. The wet sieving and decanting approach traditionally used to extract these spores, first formalized in the 1960s, remains a standard technique because it separates spores from soil particles by density differences, allowing morphological identification under a microscope based on wall structure, color, and size.

It is worth noting that spore abundance does not always track the total amount of fungal activity inside roots. A plant family might support extensive hyphal colonization of its root system while producing relatively few spores, or conversely, a modest root infection might coincide with heavy sporulation. Different fungal genera follow different strategies in this respect. Some members of the Glomeraceae, for example, are known for rapid colonization of root tissue and abundant spore production, whereas species of Acaulospora tend to sporulate more slowly and may peak in abundance at different times of year. This means the patterns observed in the rangeland study reflect a snapshot of community structure that could shift with season, and repeated sampling across a full growing cycle would help establish whether the family-level differences are stable or transient.

The negative association between spore density and soil nitrogen deserves particular attention because it connects to a well-documented feedback in plant-fungal economics. When soil nitrogen and phosphorus are plentiful, plants can reduce the carbon they allocate to root exudates and to the fungal partners themselves, since the marginal benefit of the symbiosis declines. Fungi, receiving less carbon subsidy, may respond by reducing both vegetative growth inside roots and the production of spores. The rangeland soils beneath families associated with higher fertility may therefore have hosted fungi that were metabolically active but reproductively restrained, while the poorer soils beneath other families pushed fungi toward sporulation as a survival strategy. This trade-off between growth and reproduction helps explain why the most spore-rich soils were not necessarily the most nutrient-rich ones.

Electrical conductivity, which reflects the total concentration of dissolved salts in the soil solution, has long been recognized as a constraint on mycorrhizal communities. Studies from saline environments, including work in the salt-affected soils of Iran and semiarid Mediterranean regions, have shown that elevated salinity can suppress sporulation and shift community composition toward salt-tolerant fungal taxa. The negative correlation observed in the Turkish rangeland, though modest in magnitude, is consistent with this broader literature and suggests that even moderate variation in salinity within a single landscape can leave a measurable imprint on the fungal community.

The presence of the same five fungal species across all five plant families raises interesting questions about what ecologists call assembly rules. If host identity were the only filter operating, one might expect entirely distinct fungal suites beneath each family. Instead, the data suggest a two-tier structure: a cosmopolitan core of generalist symbionts present everywhere, overlaid by family-specific differences in the relative abundance of species and in the occurrence of rarer taxa. This layered pattern mirrors findings from other ecosystems, where a handful of dominant AMF species often account for most of the community while a long tail of infrequent species contributes to differences between habitats. The higher Jaccard similarity between Fabaceae and Asteraceae hints that these two families, despite their very different biology, may impose similar rhizosphere filters, perhaps through comparable root traits or exudate chemistry.

The contrast between richness and abundance in Urticaceae is especially instructive. Hosting the greatest number of species while producing the fewest spores suggests that many fungal taxa persisted there at low densities, possibly as opportunistic residents rather than dominant partners. Nettle family plants are often associated with nitrogen-rich soils, and the nutrient conditions they create may suppress the competitive dominance of a few aggressive sporulators, allowing more species to coexist at low levels. This decoupling of richness from abundance illustrates why diversity indices must be interpreted alongside raw counts, since a community can be diverse precisely because no single species thrives.

Future work building on these findings would benefit from molecular approaches, such as sequencing of fungal DNA directly from roots and soils, which can detect species that never sporulate during the sampling period and can quantify relative abundance more precisely than spore counts alone. Combining morphological spore identification with molecular community profiling, along with measurements of root colonization intensity and hyphal length in soil, would paint a fuller picture of how plant families shape not only fungal reproduction but the entire symbiotic economy of the rangeland belowground.

Subject of Research: Soil Microbiology

Article Title: Plant family identity drives arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal spore abundance and community structure in natural rangelands

Article References: Palta, Ş., Baş, E., & Yavaşcı, Z. (2026). Plant family identity drives arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal spore abundance and community structure in natural rangelands. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 198(11), Article 1214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-16087-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-16087-2

Keywords: mycorrhizal fungi, rangelands, soil ecology, plant-fungal symbiosis, rhizosphere, biodiversity, Plant, family, identity, drives, arbuscular, mycorrhizal

The research, led by Jonathan Davies and colleagues from institutions in the United Kingdom, India, Kenya and Germany, maps the renewable-energy and carbon-storage potential of the world’s rangelands and examines what happens when green investments arrive in pastoral territories. The findings are striking: more than 82 percent of global rangelands fall into a moderate to high range for solar electricity production, and around 60 percent are commercially viable for wind energy at a 100-meter hub height. These are not marginal landscapes—they are among the most promising sites on Earth for the renewable infrastructure the climate crisis demands.

The authors used global datasets for photovoltaic power potential and wind power density, overlaying them with a rangelands map developed by the International Livestock Research Institute. Solar potential was assessed using Practical Photovoltaic Power Potential (PVOUT), which measures realistic annual electricity generation per unit of installed capacity while accounting for system losses. Wind viability was evaluated using International Electrotechnical Commission classifications, with commercial viability typically beginning above 6.5 meters per second at 80 meters height. The analysis reveals that pastoral lands are not peripheral to the energy transition—they are central to it.

But the same characteristics that make rangelands attractive to investors also make them vulnerable. Rangelands are often sparsely populated, legally ambiguous in tenure, and perceived by outsiders as underused or degraded. The authors document how this perception has historically justified dispossession: colonial and post-colonial governments annexed pastoral land for irrigation schemes, protected areas, urban expansion and infrastructure, usually without recognizing existing rights or providing compensation. Now climate policy is driving a new wave of land acquisition, and the authors warn that without safeguards, the green transition risks repeating these injustices under a sustainable banner.

The paper draws on case studies from India, Kenya and Mongolia to illustrate both the dangers and the possibilities. In Kenya, the heavily criticized Lake Turkana Wind Power Project annexed large areas of pastoral land, blocked migration routes and denied access to culturally significant sites, while benefit sharing remained negligible and token employment favors certain ethnic groups over others. Geothermal projects in the country have occupied significant land, blocked water access and contributed to drinking-water pollution. Wind farms have driven up land values, triggering rushes to claim private titles and intensifying conflict within and between communities.

In India, large tracts of rangeland are legally designated as wasteland, allowing investors to disregard prior occupation and the economic value of established pastoral land use. Large-scale solar projects have removed land from pastoral production, created unfavorable microclimates around installations, and reduced livestock health and productivity. Yet pastoralists have fought back: protests in Gujarat led to the return of project land to community ownership and a 25-year lease agreement with the developer. In Ladakh, the state administration is now planning a pilot solar project designed to accommodate livestock grazing, signaling a shift toward more compatible land-use models.

Mongolia offers a different picture. Wind-farm projects such as the Sainshand Wind Park have compensated herders by identifying alternative seasonal residences, building animal shelters and wells, and helping them register new land. Herders typically retain grazing access to all land except the small footprints where turbines stand. Communities that temporarily lose pasture during construction receive replacement fodder. The Sermsang Khushig Khundii Solar Power Plant was even re-sited after communities raised concerns during consultations about access to important salt ponds. These examples demonstrate that co-existence between energy infrastructure and pastoral livelihoods is not only possible but can generate social acceptance and better economic returns.

Kenya’s Kipeto Wind Farm stands out as perhaps the most equitable model documented. The project leases land from the local community, hired a local lawyer to navigate complex negotiations, and established a community implementation committee. A community trust holds a 5 percent share in the wind farm, and landowners receive 1.4 percent of the gross revenue from each turbine on their land. Households that had to relocate were compensated with newly constructed homes equipped with solar power, and the project built a health center and other community facilities. The county government avoided reclassifying the land from grazing to industrial use, preventing a spike in land rates that would have burdened landowners.

Beyond renewable energy, the paper examines carbon sequestration in rangelands—a sector attracting growing investment as voluntary carbon markets expand. Grasslands store an estimated third of global terrestrial carbon stocks, and improved management could sequester between 240 and 2,000 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon per year. Grasslands have the highest carbon gap density of any land use at 138.3 grams of carbon per square meter annually, and they respond more rapidly to human intervention than forests. However, the authors caution that some carbon schemes in East Africa have been reported as coercive and non-consensual, prone to corruption and aggravating land conflicts. Afforestation projects on rangelands—frequently promoted as nature-based solutions—can actually reduce biodiversity, impair ecosystem function and, in some cases, cause a net loss of carbon from the system.

The authors conclude that a just green transition depends on upholding pastoralist rights, enabling effective participation and ensuring equitable benefit sharing. Projects that succeed do so because they recognize pastoralists’ land rights, engage communities in meaningful and ongoing consultation, and treat pastoralism as a legitimate and valuable land-use practice rather than an obstacle to progress. The green transition does not have to be another chapter in the long history of pastoral dispossession—but making it otherwise will require deliberate policy, strong governance and a fundamental shift in how investors and governments value the world’s rangelands and the people who have sustained them for millennia.

Subject of Research: The potential of pastoral rangelands for renewable energy and carbon sequestration and the risks of land alienation for pastoralist communities during the green transition

Article Title: Pastoral lands and the green transition: opportunities and challenges

Article References: Davies, J., Bhati, S. P. S., Wario, H., Rawat, M., & Waters-Bayer, A. (2026). Pastoral lands and the green transition: opportunities and challenges. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 16429. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16429

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16429

Keywords: pastoralism, rangelands, green transition, renewable energy, carbon sequestration, land rights, solar power, wind energy, just transition, pastoralist communities, land governance, climate mitigation

The scale of the issue is enormous. According to FAO land use data, roughly one-fourth of the world’s land area—almost 3.2 billion hectares—is covered by permanent meadows and pastures, and about 80 percent of all agricultural land is devoted to livestock, whether as grazing land or for fodder production. An estimated 4.6 billion livestock animals, excluding poultry and pigs, roam the continents, tended in part by several hundred million pastoralists whose production systems, climates, species and environments vary enormously. Despite this diversity, academic debates and policy decisions often rely on uniform approaches that approximate each livestock species’ climate impact using standardized data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The editors of the Special Issue, led by Andrei Marin of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences together with Jonathan Davies, Fiona Flintan, Carol Kerven and Rashmi Singh, contend that such one-size-fits-all estimates misrepresent the complex realities of pastoral systems.

The evidence for this misrepresentation is mounting. A recent exchange between the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Norwegian statistics authority revealed that reported enteric methane emissions from sheep in Norway were overestimated by 30 percent in every annual report going back to 1990. Similarly, a global meta-analysis of methane emissions from bovids indicates that emissions from yaks on the Asian Plateau may be as much as 39 percent lower than the standard IPCC Tier 2 model would predict. The editors are careful to note that this does not mean IPCC models are wrong or always overestimate; rather, even flexible estimates depend on difficult simplifications and approximations of each livestock system.

The details required for reliable methane emission indicators are extraordinarily fine-grained. Researchers would need to know how much an animal moves during a day, the seasonal cycle of weather conditions, the temperature of the animal facility, and even whether a crust is allowed to form on top of liquid manure tanks. Because of this, measuring emissions directly in the atmosphere above livestock systems holds promise for better estimates—and at least one study shows that for highly intensive systems, methane emissions may actually be as much as 90 percent higher than IPCC calculations suggest. This discrepancy carries a sobering implication: the hypothesis that intensifying livestock production reduces greenhouse gas emissions, especially in developing countries, deserves caution. Even with ambitious and costly technological improvements, the effect may amount to less than a quarter of the emissions expected under a business-as-usual scenario—and that is before accounting for the broader social and environmental costs of such transformations.

There is also a pronounced data bias. Most of the data used in greenhouse gas emission assessments comes from intensive livestock systems in the global North, while narratives about livestock emissions continue to shape policies targeting the extensive systems of pastoralists in the global South. The stakes are high: positions taken by governments, international donors and NGOs can influence support for livestock sectors through initiatives such as the Breakthrough Agenda. Consumers, meanwhile, increasingly factor environmental impact into food choices, and official dietary guidelines in some regions promote major reductions in livestock products for so-called planetary health—guidelines that have drawn criticism, most recently in the form of legislative initiatives banning meat-related product names such as “hamburgers” and “sausages” for plant-based alternatives. The textile industry is likewise marketing alternatives to livestock products as less climate-damaging. All of these choices rest on a limited understanding of the complex relationship between pastoralist systems and climate, one that seldom accounts for local specificities or indirect effects such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity preservation and albedo maintenance.

The Special Issue probes this debate by distinguishing two broad forms of livestock production. Intensive systems rely on capital investment, technologies such as housing and fencing, and supplementary feed, allowing denser animal populations and faster growth driven by concentrated feed and antibiotics. Extensive systems—pastoralism—involve animals predominantly grazed on open pastures, often with mobile herding and communal land use, characterized by lower external inputs, a higher ratio of labour, and lower livestock density per unit of land. Evidence is accumulating that intensive systems carry greater negative climate impacts, while extensive systems can play a substantial role in safeguarding climate-regulating ecosystem services. To assume all livestock production systems have comparable harmful effects may overlook the genuine benefits of pastoralism.

Yet the picture is not uniformly rosy for extensive systems. A study of cattle farming in Amazonia, Brazil, by Corrêa and colleagues found that moderately intensified farms achieve 55 percent higher meat production than extensive farms with similar energy consumption per hectare. Intensive farms produce dramatically higher yields—nine times those of extensive systems—but consume 14 times more energy per hectare, primarily through fertilization and supplemental feed, and emit seven times more greenhouse gases per hectare, with methane accounting for the bulk. Intriguingly, intensive farms show 55 percent lower emissions per ton of meat. The authors conclude that eco-efficiency can be improved through moderate intensification, but that further intensification reverses these gains, crossing a tipping point into energy-hungry, mechanized production. Recommended practices—many already used by pastoralists—include rotational grazing, improved stocking rate management, soil fertility maintenance, pasture restoration and forage management.

Other case studies reinforce the need for precision. In Tanzania, Mwilawa and colleagues compared traditional grazing with feedlot systems, showing that supplementary concentrate feeding raises the feed conversion ratio and lowers methane emission intensity per unit of product, while also revealing breed differences: Boran cattle produced more enteric methane than Tanzanian Short Horn Zebu, likely due to greater dry matter intake associated with larger body size. In Kenya, Gurmu and colleagues calculated Tier 2 annual emission factors for cattle across seasons, finding significant differences by breed, herd composition, live weight, weight gains, milk yield and digestible energy—variability that Tier 1 assumptions ignore and that risks miscalculating pastoral emissions. From Mongolia, Lkhamaachin and colleagues produced country-specific Tier 2 calculations for sheep across desert-steppe, steppe and forest-steppe zones, incorporating seasonal weight change, pasture quality and the energy cost of migration. Their findings included surprises: young adult sheep emitted up to 20 percent less than the IPCC standard, while mature sheep and lambs exceeded it, and Mongolian sheep converted more feed energy into methane, presumably due to harsh climate, extensive mobility and low forage digestibility. Rather than blanket livestock reduction, the authors propose management targeted at ewes during pregnancy and lactation.

Goats, often blamed for environmental degradation, receive a more nuanced verdict. A review by Kerven shows that goats, with high feed conversion efficiency, emit less enteric methane than all other domestic ruminants, and that goat-based pastoral systems play a vital role in building livelihoods in difficult socio-environmental contexts—including the cashmere trade. In Mediterranean Turkey, Ocak Yetişgin and Canan document the Sarıkeçililer community’s annual 400–450 kilometre migration between coastal highlands and upland pastures, a tradition now squeezed by climate change, market pressures and policy neglect. They argue pastoralism should be recognized as a cornerstone of sustainable agriculture, not a relic. From the Indian Himalayas, Banka and colleagues show that the Chopan community’s rotational grazing remains within ecological limits, maintains soil fertility and supports regional food security, despite structural marginalization. Davies and colleagues map the enormous photovoltaic and wind energy potential of pastoral rangelands, warning that green transition projects could either secure pastoral land rights or dispossess communities, depending on safeguards and consent. An ethnographic study in northern Mongolia by Imoli critiques the detached, abstract concept of climate change used by institutions, showing how post-socialist upheaval left pastoralists navigating a volatile market and changing climate with minimal institutional support.

The overarching message is captured in a phrase the editors highlight: “it’s not the cow, it’s the how!” Rather than seeking common metrics, the editors propose understanding the complexities and particularities of individual pastoral systems. Future research should incorporate fine-grained seasonal data and extended methodologies such as Environmental Life Cycle Assessment, Life Cycle Costs and Social Life Cycle Assessment. With the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralism in 2026 uniting more than 420 organizations to dispel myths and strengthen policy frameworks, the editors argue that nuanced, context-specific understanding is indispensable for just policy pathways—and that pastoralists, far from being a climate problem, may yet prove part of the solution.

Subject of Research: The role of pastoral livestock systems in climate change, methane emissions accounting and rangeland sustainability

Article Title: Editorial: The role of pastoral livestock and products in climate change: a complicated issue

Article References: Marin, A., Davies, J., Flintan, F., Kerven, C., & Singh, R. (2026). Editorial: The role of pastoral livestock and products in climate change: a complicated issue. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 16611. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16611

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16611

Keywords: pastoralism, livestock, climate change, methane emissions, IPCC, rangelands, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, green transition, transhumance, sustainable agriculture, Tier 2 emissions

The research team, led by Fiona Flintan of the International Livestock Research Institute, set out to fill a conspicuous gap in how the world measures land security. Global initiatives such as Prindex, which surveyed 107,849 people across 108 countries in its second round completed in 2024, ask individuals whether they could lose their land or property. But these instruments are built around private, individual ownership and largely ignore collective tenure systems, the customary, community-based arrangements that are estimated to cover roughly 3.1 billion hectares of the planet. Rangelands alone span 54 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface, and virtually all of them are governed as commons, with nested layers of rights allocated to herders, grass cutters, beekeepers, gum collectors and, increasingly, encroaching farmers. For the women who depend on these landscapes, the relevant question is not whether their names appear on a certificate but whether the group’s rights are robust and whether the group will protect them as members.

The study deliberately selected three pastoralist communities known to have well-functioning customary governance: the Wakilé Allah Fulani clan in Zoundwéogo Province, Burkina Faso, numbering around 3,000 people; the Bagagir community of North Kordofan, Sudan, around 2,000 people bound by common ancestry; and the Waldaa Boran of northern Marsabit, Kenya, settled in their area since the early 1980s. Between 2022 and 2023, the researchers ran twelve focus group discussions, mixed and sex-segregated, involving 18 participants in Burkina Faso, 33 in Sudan and 23 in Kenya. Sessions began with participatory mapping of grazing lands and moved on to a technique more familiar from survey research than from village discussion: probabilistic questioning. Participants were asked how likely it was that they would lose their land, or their freedom to move livestock, within one year, five years, ten years, or over a lifetime, and whether their children would inherit the community’s rights of access and mobility.

The answers split sharply along lines that had little to do with formal law and everything to do with social structure. Among the Bagagir in Sudan, most men and women said it was unlikely or very unlikely that they would lose their lands or mobility at any point in their lifetime. The community, which has occupied Rahad el Tamor for more than a century, considers itself asyad elarid, landowners, on the strength of first settlement and four generations of uninterrupted use, even though the land formally belongs to the state. Their confidence rested on three pillars: a strong sense of historical rights, membership in the wider and respected Kababish confederation that can be called upon for support, and an abundance of good grazing land with no mineral deposits to attract competition. In Kenya, the Waldaa also reported strong group cohesion, reinforced by the 2016 Community Land Act, which the community sees as a route to further strengthening tenure because men and women alike can be listed in the registration document. Yet the Waldaa perceived relatively high short-term insecurity, driven not by weaknesses within the group but by the slow pace of land registration and by the unsettling example of the LAPSSET transport corridor, where neighbouring communities in Isiolo have been sidelined from decisions and removed from their land.

The Wakilé Allah of Burkina Faso told a different story. The community arrived only about 45 years ago, after severe droughts pushed them south from northern Burkina Faso, and they live on land ultimately controlled by the chief of their Bissa farmer hosts. Most respondents, including women and youth, said it was somewhat likely or very likely that the group would lose access to its most important grazing land, and its mobility, within the next one to five years. Agricultural encroachment, privatization of peri-urban land, mining, and weak law enforcement were cited as the main threats, and women in particular highlighted weakening social cohesion. Yet in a striking inconsistency, about half of respondents were very confident that their children would inherit community rights, reasoning that educated children would be better placed to defend those rights in the long run. Men held this long-term hope more firmly than women, and younger participants were markedly more pessimistic than their elders, who trusted the village chief’s wisdom and the value of ongoing negotiations.

Beneath these national contrasts, the study uncovered a common technical pattern with major policy implications. Perceived tenure security in these pastoralist systems is produced socially rather than legally. Group solidarity, reciprocity and institutionalized leadership emerged as the protective factors cited by both men and women in all three sites. In Sudan, the social architecture is elaborate: nafir, organized voluntary collective labour for households in need, and fazza, a communal effort to recover stolen animals, keep mutual obligation alive, while widowed and unmarried women receive support from relatives and neighbours. In Burkina Faso, pastoralists have united to protest encroachment on their lands, and both men and women said open dialogue with host communities was among the most important factors preventing the loss of their rights. When those dialogues weakened, perceived insecurity rose. The researchers found that women often placed even greater emphasis than men on cohesion and communication as the sinews of tenure security.

The findings push back against the standard narrative in which pastoralist women are portrayed simply as victims of male-dominated institutions. In Sudan, although cultural norms restrict young women’s mobility and keep women out of formal decision-making, the women interviewed did not express dissatisfaction; they valued the security the group provided and the certainty of assistance in times of need. In Kenya, Waldaa women go further: they have historically been included in the council of elders as equal and capable members, their land rights are described as a birthright equal to men’s, and this central involvement appears to sharpen their knowledge of threats and opportunities, including the benefits of registration under the Community Land Act. Only in Burkina Faso, where the pastoral system is newer, more precarious and under greater external pressure, did women report less knowledge of tenure issues, less influence over decisions and less confidence in their leaders, though even there they located the principal threat outside the group, in expanding farming, rather than within their own institutions.

The study also documents why the alternative, privatization, can be dangerous for women. In Kenya, women lost out during the dismantling of group ranches, with individual titles granted primarily to men. In India, Maldahari pastoralist women have lost community status as mechanized crop farming displaces pastoral roles. Researchers describe such women as falling between two stools: unprotected by a weakening customary system and unprotected by a formal legal system that never reaches them. Individual titling may deliver short-term reassurance, but over the long term it shrinks the commons, erodes the group and can leave women with less access to shared resources than they had as members of a collective. Meanwhile, growing numbers of unmarried pastoralist women living alone face new vulnerabilities that neither regime adequately addresses.

The authors are careful about the limits of their work. They purposively chose well-governed communities precisely to study collective dynamics relatively undisturbed by leadership conflict or mass outmigration, which means the findings cannot be generalized to contexts of weak governance or active conflict. The reliance on focus groups, without follow-up individual interviews or surveys, leaves room for triangulation in future research, and the study itself notes that even in well-ordered communities some members had ignored group rules and claimed land for individual use, fractures that leaders had to correct. Older participants worried that a more individualistic, market-oriented youth, drawn to gold mining and work abroad, could weaken the social fabric on which security depends, even as those same young people still relied on relatives to fund their ventures.

Nevertheless, the policy conclusions are pointed. Global land indicators and monitoring frameworks should explicitly measure collective tenure and perceptions of security within collectives, rather than relying solely on individual ownership metrics. Interventions aimed at strengthening women’s land rights should prioritize reinforcing collective governance institutions and women’s representation within them, with formalization pursued cautiously and in context. And legal processes such as Kenya’s Community Land Act should be implemented at a pace and in a manner that reinforces, rather than disrupts, customary institutions. As climate change intensifies pressure on the drylands, the study suggests that the most effective shelter for pastoralist women’s land rights may not be a piece of paper with one name on it, but the collective itself, its institutions, its social ties and the channels it opens for women’s voices.

Subject of Research: Pastoralist women's perceptions of land tenure security within collective tenure systems in Burkina Faso, Sudan and Kenya

Article Title: Pastoralist women’s perceptions of tenure security and implications for collective tenure regimes, policies and practices

Article References: Flintan, F., Nassef, M., Sawadogo, I., Sulieman, H., Otieno, K., Langdown, I., Locke, A., Meinzen-Dick, R., & Doss, C. (2026). Pastoralist women’s perceptions of tenure security and implications for collective tenure regimes, policies and practices. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 16531. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16531

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16531

Keywords: land tenure security, pastoralism, women's land rights, collective tenure, rangelands, customary governance, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Kenya, commons, land indicators, climate resilience

The stakes could hardly be higher. The eastern migratory monarch population has declined by roughly 80 percent over the past thirty years in the United States, a collapse driven by the loss of host and nectar plants, land use change, and pesticide exposure. Milkweed, the obligate host plant on which monarch females lay their eggs and on which monarch caterpillars feed exclusively, has fared especially poorly in agricultural landscapes. Researchers estimate that milkweed in the midwestern United States declined by about 40 percent between 1999 and 2014, a loss of approximately 860 million stems. Because an estimated 38 percent of monarchs overwintering in Mexico originate from the Midwest, that loss has been directly correlated with declines in the overwintering population.

Conservation planners have proposed adding 1.6 billion milkweed stems across the Midwest to stabilize the overwintering population at its six-hectare target. Much of the effort to date has focused on croplands, roadside rights-of-way, and urban plantings. But rangelands, the unplowed expanses of native grasses and forbs that cover nearly twice as much land as croplands in the United States, remain an understudied frontier. Prior estimates suggest rangelands already host some 4.1 billion milkweed stems across 13.2 million hectares. The question the new study set out to answer was whether ranchers could push those numbers higher, not by taking land out of production, but simply by changing how cattle are distributed across the landscape in space and time.

The research team, led by Ellysa Johnson of North Dakota State University, conducted their experiment at the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center near Streeter, North Dakota, between June and August of 2021 and 2022. The site sits in mixed-grass prairie on the western edge of the eastern monarch’s breeding range, and it supports eight native milkweed species, although five species dominated the counts: common milkweed made up 72 percent of stems, showy milkweed 20 percent, oval-leaf milkweed 8.4 percent, with swamp and green comet milkweed trailing far behind. Over two summers, the researchers walked 288 transects, each 150 meters long, three times per season, tallying every milkweed stem, every flowering forb, and every monarch egg, caterpillar, and adult they encountered.

The experimental design was the heart of the study. The team compared three grazing strategies that had been implemented in 2017, each replicated across four 64-hectare pastures stocked at similar rates with cow-calf pairs. The first, season-long grazing, is the most common approach in the Northern Great Plains: cattle roam the entire pasture continuously through the growing season with no internal fencing. The second, patch-burn grazing, exploits a phenomenon called pyric herbivory, in which cattle are drawn to lush, nutritious regrowth on recently burned patches, leaving older unburned areas comparatively lightly grazed. A quarter of each patch-burn pasture is burned annually on a four-year rotation, creating a mosaic of vegetation structure. The third strategy, a modified twice-over rest-rotation system, builds heterogeneity without fire by dividing each pasture into four fenced paddocks: one fully rested for the year, one moderately grazed, one fully grazed, and one heavily grazed, with paddock roles rotating between years so that each section experiences a shifting disturbance regime.

The results were striking. Across both years, the team counted 33,893 milkweed stems, and abundance differed sharply among grazing strategies. The modified twice-over rest-rotation system supported significantly more milkweed than either patch-burn grazing or season-long grazing. The researchers attribute this to the rested paddock: because cattle will eat milkweed when it is available, completely removing grazers from a portion of the pasture for a full growing season gives the plants a reprieve. In both patch-burn and season-long pastures, cattle have continuous access to milkweed across the entire area, and even though patch-burn cattle concentrate most of their foraging on burned patches, they still target flowering plants throughout the pasture. Notably, milkweed abundance did not decline during the severe drought that gripped the site in 2021, likely because the dominant species, common and showy milkweed, are clonal plants whose underground networks make them resistant to disturbance.

Flowering forbs told a more complicated story. The team recorded 185,375 flowering forbs from 117 species, and their abundance depended on an interaction between grazing strategy and year. The rest-rotation system hosted the most flowers overall, but the advantage was significant only in 2021, the drought year. That year, patch-burn pastures suffered a dramatic floral crash, a consequence of burning early in the season followed immediately by extreme drought and grazing pressure. Yet the recovery was remarkable: flowering forbs in the patch-burn treatment rebounded fourfold in 2022, matching the other strategies. The rested paddocks of the rest-rotation system, which held 40 percent of the treatment’s flowering forbs in the drought year compared to 21 percent in 2022, appear to have functioned as refugia, sheltering the floral community from concentrated grazing when drought reduced forage production across the landscape.

The monarch counts tracked the vegetation. Over two summers, the researchers detected 182 adult monarchs and 165 juveniles, all of the eggs and caterpillars found on either showy or common milkweed. Statistical models revealed that both adult and juvenile monarch abundance were positively and significantly correlated with milkweed abundance, meaning that as milkweed stems increased, monarchs of every life stage followed. What surprised the team was what did not matter: flowering forb abundance showed no significant relationship with monarch counts, for either adults or juveniles, despite the fact that adult monarchs depend on nectar to fuel their flights. The authors caution that the survey design could not fully disentangle the two resources, because plots with abundant milkweed rarely also had abundant flowers, but the takeaway is clear: in these rangelands, milkweed is the resource that best predicts monarch presence and reproduction. Altogether, the rest-rotation pastures supported 192 monarchs, versus 76 in patch-burn and 79 in season-long grazing.

The milkweed densities the team measured, between 445 and 634 stems per hectare, fall below figures from more eastern states such as Minnesota and Iowa, where densities approach 1,500 stems per hectare, but they are consistent with averages from protected grasslands across the eastern monarch range, around 399 to 543 plants per hectare, and far above densities reported from Nebraska. For a region north of the 45th parallel, on the edge of the breeding range, those are respectable numbers, and they demonstrate that even actively grazed rangelands can produce high milkweed densities. The monarch is currently proposed for listing as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the findings suggest that rangelands, particularly in the Prairie Pothole Region, can serve as working landscapes that support both livestock production and monarch conservation simultaneously, without requiring land to be retired from ranching.

The broader lesson is about heterogeneity, the patchwork of different vegetation structures and disturbance intensities that fire and grazing historically created across the Great Plains. Both the patch-burn and rest-rotation strategies are explicitly designed to recreate that mosaic, and both supported more monarchs than uniform season-long grazing. The magnitude of the benefit, however, depends on how disturbance is distributed in space and time, and on how weather interacts with management, as the drought-driven floral collapse in the patch-burn pastures made plain. The researchers recommend adaptive management, particularly adjusting grazing in pastures scheduled to burn ahead of severe drought, and call for future work on how the timing of grazing and milkweed species identity shape oviposition preference, predator pressure, and monarch success. What is already certain is that billions of milkweed stems are waiting on rangelands, and with the right grazing playbook, ranchers may become some of the monarch’s most important allies.

Subject of Research: Effects of livestock grazing strategies on milkweed availability and monarch butterfly abundance in Great Plains rangelands

Article Title: Novel grazing strategies increase milkweed (Asclepias spp.) availability and monarch (Danaus plexippus) abundance in rangelands

Article References: Johnson, E. R., Donahey, E. C., Kral-O’Brien, K. C., Harmon, J. P., Sedivec, K. K., & Hovick, T. J. (2026). Novel grazing strategies increase milkweed (Asclepias spp.) availability and monarch (Danaus plexippus) abundance in rangelands. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 14, Article 1914674. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2026.1914674

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2026.1914674

Keywords: monarch butterfly, milkweed, rangelands, grazing management, patch-burn grazing, rest-rotation grazing, conservation, pyric herbivory, drought, prairie pothole region, pollinators, working landscapes

IBLI was introduced in Kenya in 2010 through a partnership between the Government of Kenya, the World Bank, and research institutions including the International Livestock Research Institute. Its central innovation was to abandon the costly, labor-intensive model of traditional indemnity insurance, in which assessors must verify every claim on the ground. Instead, the program relies on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, or NDVI, a measure of green vegetation computed from satellite imagery. When NDVI values across a defined insurance unit drop below a preset threshold, payouts are triggered automatically. The design eliminates moral hazard and adverse selection, slashes administrative costs, and offers a transparency that conventional livestock insurance in remote regions has rarely achieved. For pastoralists whose herds constitute both their income and their savings, the promise was transformative.

Yet the scheme carries an inherent vulnerability. Because payouts depend on a satellite-derived index rather than on actual losses experienced by individual households, a gap can open between what herders suffer and what insurers pay. Economists distinguish two forms of this basis risk. Upside basis risk occurs when payouts arrive despite no real loss, a windfall that can only improve welfare. Downside basis risk is the opposite and far more damaging case: a family watches animals die in a drought, yet the index signals that forage remained sufficient, and no indemnity arrives. It is this second form that the new study places at the center of its analysis, arguing that repeated experience of unpaid losses may reshape household behavior in ways that erode the program’s welfare benefits.

To quantify the problem, the researchers assembled data from the IBLI program covering 2019 through 2021 across Garissa, Isiolo, Mandera, Marsabit, Samburu, Tana River, Turkana, and Wajir counties. Forage availability was proxied using MODIS satellite NDVI imagery at a resolution of 250 meters, aggregated into ten-day composites and then averaged to the county level, which corresponds to the insurance unit. Rainfall came from the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data, a gridded dataset at roughly five-kilometer resolution that is widely used for drought monitoring. After quality control, standardization into anomalies relative to historical means, and alignment across 5,706 observations, the team employed a two-stage empirical strategy to measure how closely the vegetation index tracks the rainfall that drives forage growth.

The first stage used quantile regression, a technique chosen for its robustness to outliers and its ability to capture relationships at different points of the conditional distribution. Rather than modeling average vegetation conditions, the researchers focused on the fifth percentile of standardized NDVI, because IBLI is designed to protect herders against the catastrophic tail of forage scarcity, not against ordinary variation. In 2019, the relationship between precipitation and forage was strong and statistically significant: an additional unit of current-season rainfall was associated with a 0.049-unit increase in standardized NDVI, with lagged rainfall from two years earlier contributing a further 0.057 units, both showing diminishing returns at higher rainfall levels. By 2021, however, neither current nor lagged precipitation showed a statistically significant relationship with vegetation, a temporal instability that itself carries implications for how reliably any rainfall- or vegetation-based index can predict localized drought losses.

The second stage applied a modified variance-of-error approach, treating the unexplained residual divergence between NDVI and precipitation as an indirect measure of basis risk. The results were striking in their consistency. Every county, in every year of the study period, exhibited positive values of the basis-risk parameter, indicating downside basis risk throughout the region. Garissa recorded the largest average mismatch at 0.2508 over the full period, followed by Isiolo at 0.1755 and Wajir at 0.1105, while Mandera showed the smallest at 0.0381. The distributions of both NDVI and precipitation were positively skewed, meaning adverse events occurred more frequently than the favorable anomalies that would generate payouts without losses. In plain terms, herders across northern Kenya repeatedly bore losses that the insurance index failed to capture.

To translate these measurements into welfare terms, the authors built a theoretical framework grounded in expected utility theory, modeling a risk-averse pastoralist whose wealth evolves across four mutually exclusive states of nature: loss with a matching signal, loss without a signal, no loss with a signal, and no loss without a signal. Because basis risk is unobservable to insurers, it cannot be written into contracts, but herders learn about it through experience. The framework predicts an important asymmetry. Households that receive payouts without losses, the upside case, may increase spending on welfare-enhancing goods such as food, education, healthcare, and leisure. Households that suffer losses without compensation, the downside case, are predicted to cut back on precisely those expenditures as a coping mechanism, deplete savings, and forgo interest income, with the anticipation of future downside risk potentially discouraging deposits in financial institutions altogether.

An illustrative calculation for Wajir County, using a representative herder with an initial endowment of 15 Tropical Livestock Units, the minimum herd size generally considered necessary to sustain a pastoral livelihood, demonstrates the mechanism. In each year from 2019 to 2021, the insured loss implied by the index fell short of the actual loss, satisfying the theoretical condition for a welfare loss. The authors are careful to frame this as an application of the theoretical model rather than a causal county-level estimate, and they acknowledge a central limitation: the study lacks household-level data on livestock mortality, indemnity payments, and consumption at the spatial and temporal resolution needed to validate the proxy directly. The NDVI-precipitation divergence may also reflect ecological heterogeneity, grazing management, and measurement error rather than insurance shortfalls alone.

Even with those caveats, the findings challenge a body of earlier research that reported welfare gains from IBLI, including evidence from Mongolia showing that payouts facilitated rapid herd recovery and Kenyan studies identifying income stabilization and shifts toward higher-return herding strategies. The new analysis suggests that persistent downside basis risk may offset those benefits, imposing psychological and economic burdens that can outweigh the nominal value of coverage even when premiums are heavily subsidized. The study also connects to a growing experimental literature showing that farmers are acutely sensitive to basis risk, that demand for index insurance falls as basis risk rises, and that ambiguity aversion can delay or reduce adoption, particularly among households unfamiliar with the technology.

The policy implications are concrete. The authors argue that subsidy structures should be revisited so that participation reflects deliberate choices rather than blanket incentives, that index precision must improve, and that behavioral considerations deserve a place in program design. Notably, they cite evidence that rainfall-based indices with higher spatial resolution exhibit lower basis risk than NDVI-based systems, suggesting a possible path forward. They also point to the institutional context: communal grazing regimes can blunt individual-level incentives, and strengthening land tenure and grazing rights could improve both targeting and uptake. As climate variability intensifies across the Horn of Africa, the study’s central message is sobering but constructive. Index insurance can still deliver on its promise, but only if the gap between what satellites see and what herders live through is narrowed, and only if insurers recognize that households are not passive policyholders but adaptive learners who update their trust with every unpaid loss.

Subject of Research: Basis risk and welfare effects of satellite-based index livestock insurance for pastoralists in northern Kenya

Article Title: Welfare effects of behavioral responses to basis risk in remote-sensing livestock insurance in northern Kenya

Article References: Maina, S., Miller, M., Torell, G. L., Hanan, N. P., Anchang, J., & Kahiu, N. (2026). Welfare effects of behavioral responses to basis risk in remote-sensing livestock insurance in northern Kenya. Frontiers in Environmental Economics, 5, Article 1750935. https://doi.org/10.3389/frevc.2026.1750935

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frevc.2026.1750935

Keywords: index-based livestock insurance, basis risk, NDVI, pastoralism, northern Kenya, drought, remote sensing, welfare economics, consumption smoothing, climate variability, behavioral economics, rangelands

The research team, led by Banzragch Nandintsetseg of Tottori University’s International Platform for Dryland Research and Education, built what they describe as the first national-scale, scenario-based climate–rangeland–society framework for assessing future dzud risk. The model couples climate hazard projections from five Earth System Models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) with a process-based ecosystem model, ORCHIDEE-GM v3.2, that simulates aboveground net primary productivity of Mongolia’s rangelands. On top of this biophysical foundation sits a socioeconomic layer: a herd-growth model tracking births, dzud mortality, disease mortality, and offtake through domestic consumption and exports, calibrated against decades of data from Mongolia’s National Statistical Office. The framework’s historical validation is impressive, reproducing observed livestock mortality with a correlation of 0.79, hay preparedness at 0.84, and livestock population trends at 0.97.

The historical record the model draws upon is sobering. Between 2000 and 2024, dzuds killed approximately 100.3 million livestock in sheep units. The worst events clustered in the 2000s: the 2000–2002 disasters claimed 26.6 million animals, roughly 10 to 22 percent of the national herd; the record 2009–2010 dzud killed over 10 million animals, about 20 percent of the herd; and the consecutive dzuds of 2023–2024 destroyed more than 13 million livestock across two years, inflicting economic damages estimated at 1.5 to 1.9 billion US dollars. In the most affected regions, 63.3 percent of surveyed households reported livestock losses. These are not abstract statistics—they represent the collapse of livelihoods, rural poverty, food insecurity, and waves of outmigration from the countryside to Ulaanbaatar’s crowded periphery.

Crucially, the study shows that dzud is not simply a weather phenomenon. Statistical analysis of the hazard index reveals a significant increasing trend driven primarily by escalating summer drought frequency and intensity, while winter severity itself shows no statistically significant long-term trend. What has changed most dramatically is the vulnerability side of the risk equation. After livestock privatisation in the early 1990s, Mongolia’s national herd doubled from roughly 55 million to 110 million sheep units by 2024, while hay preparedness per animal declined by 33.7 percent relative to the pre-1990 baseline. The herd has now grown approximately 2.5-fold since 1990, far surpassing the national rangeland carrying capacity of about 103 million sheep units, contributing to rangeland degradation that researchers estimate has already deteriorated roughly 70 percent in some assessments.

The future projections are where the study’s alarm bells ring loudest. Under all three climate scenarios examined—SSP1-2.6, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5—ensemble projections indicate that dzuds will occur nearly annually from the mid-2030s, totalling 13 to 15 events during 2036–2050. Under the high-warming SSP5-8.5 scenario, dzud-related mortality peaks at 49.5 million sheep units in the 2040s. The climate mechanics are compound and cruel: regional air temperatures rise by 2.3 to 2.9 degrees Celsius while precipitation falls by 7.4 to 10.1 percent, with decreases reaching 30 percent in western and central-eastern regions. Meanwhile, snowfall is projected to increase by 24.7 to 29.5 percent across all scenarios, with local maxima of up to 80 percent in western Mongolia. More drought weakens animals going into winter; more snow buries the pasture they need to survive it.

Vulnerability projections compound the hazard story. The national herd is projected to exceed 170 million sheep units by the early 2040s under baseline pathways—more than 60 percent above carrying capacity. Domestic meat demand is expected to grow by 60.7 to 82.2 percent, driven by human population growth of up to 52.3 percent and GDP expansion of up to 5.4-fold, mediated through an income elasticity model. Although total hay preparedness increases modestly thanks to rising rangeland productivity and greater household vehicle ownership, per-animal hay availability declines as the herd swells. In dzud years, hay deficits are projected to run 12.5 to 24.2 percent below the historical average, pushing animals into fatal nutritional stress. Livestock revenues, which rise 22.2 to 27.4 percent during 2025–2035, are projected to fall by roughly 25 percent in the early 2040s under business-as-usual conditions as climate hazards and overstocking collide.

The export-enhanced pathways represent the study’s most consequential finding. Rather than treating export expansion as a simple market-opening exercise, the researchers modelled it as a shift in the fundamental incentive structure of Mongolian pastoralism. Export shares rise gradually from the historical baseline of 0.98 percent of the herd to scenario-specific targets of 5.5 to 6.5 percent by 2050, following a logistic growth trajectory with an inflection point in 2037. The logic is elegant: if herders earn more per animal through quality-focused, timely offtake, they can meet revenue goals with smaller herds. This breaks the demographic inertia that currently sustains herd growth—birth rates of about 31 percent, negligible disease mortality of 0.08 percent, and minimal export offtake—allowing populations to stabilise by the early 2040s and then decline below the carrying capacity threshold.

The quantified results are dramatic. Export-enhanced pathways reduce annual dzud mortality from 8 to 11 million sheep units under baseline pathways down to 1 to 3 million, preventing an estimated 6.0 to 9.5 million animal deaths annually during 2036–2050. Simultaneously, meat revenues increase by 9.2 to 25.4 percent under the business-as-usual export variant, 33.2 to 36.3 percent under SSP-aligned trends, and 27.6 to 34.1 percent under the Vision 2050 development pathway, relative to 2024 levels. The authors emphasise that this demonstrates ecological and socioeconomic sustainability are mutually reinforcing rather than competing goals—a rare and hopeful message in climate adaptation literature. But they are equally clear that the outcome is not automatic: herders have historically responded to market opportunities by accumulating more animals, not fewer, meaning robust institutional frameworks must accompany any export promotion to avoid perverse incentives.

The implementation challenges are formidable. Entering high-value export markets requires compliance with stringent sanitary standards, most critically Foot-and-Mouth Disease certification, demanding sustained investment in veterinary services, epidemiological surveillance, and cross-border biosecurity. The study calls for coordinated investment in veterinary certification, traceability systems, cold-chain logistics, and herder cooperatives, alongside regulatory tools such as pasture taxation and price transmission mechanisms that ensure herders—not market intermediaries—capture the value of export growth. Mongolia’s grass-fed, pasture-based production could be positioned as a premium brand, but only if export growth is grounded in ecological monitoring, herd size regulation, and equitable market access. The authors also caution that hay reserves, while useful, are a temporary buffer rather than a structural solution, since they do not address the proximate drivers of vulnerability: chronic overstocking and rangeland degradation.

The implications extend well beyond Mongolia’s borders. Drylands defined by an aridity index below 0.65 support nearly two billion people, and the study’s integrated framework is explicitly designed to be transferable to comparable Central Asian pastoral systems in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where export promotion experiences offer valuable comparative lessons. The researchers acknowledge their model’s limitations—including national-scale aggregation that cannot capture household-level vulnerability, where families near the minimum viable herd size face the greatest catastrophic risk, and known wet biases in certain CMIP6 models that may overestimate future forage availability. Yet the core message stands with unusual clarity: Mongolia’s pastoralism is approaching a critical threshold of systemic risk beyond which recovery becomes increasingly difficult, and the window for transformative adaptation—aligning herd sizes with ecological limits through market-based offtake, supported by inclusive governance—is open now but narrowing as the mid-2030s approach.

Subject of Research: Projected climate change impacts on dzud livestock mortality and sustainable pastoral pathways in Mongolia's eastern Eurasian drylands

Article Title: Future climate change risks and sustainable pathways for pastoralism in the eastern Eurasian drylands

Article References: Nandintsetseg, B., Shinoda, M., Chang, J., Oniki, S., Agipar, B., Reyer, C. P. O., & Davaadalai, J. (2026). Future climate change risks and sustainable pathways for pastoralism in the eastern Eurasian drylands. npj Sustainable Agriculture, 4(1), Article 78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44264-026-00173-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44264-026-00173-6

Keywords: Mongolia, dzud, pastoralism, climate change, rangelands, livestock mortality, CMIP6, overstocking, meat exports, drylands, sustainability, adaptation

The research, published in the Journal of Mammalogy, used species distribution modeling to project where gemsbok could survive under future climate scenarios. The results are striking. Today, the animals occupy a relatively confined area of southern New Mexico, having expanded roughly 100 kilometers from their original introduction point. By the end of the century, however, the models show suitable habitat spilling well beyond state lines into Texas, Arizona, Utah, and California, and even reaching as far north as southern Washington and Montana. If the animals disperse into all of these spaces, the consequences for cattle ranching, native wildlife, and plant communities across the region could be profound.

What makes the projections credible is the way the team built them. Rather than relying solely on traditional wildlife surveys, the researchers turned to participant science. Photographs uploaded by ordinary people to platforms like iNaturalist flow into the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a database that aggregates species occurrence records from around the world. From those records, lead author Nathan Alexander, who began the work as a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at Illinois and is now a postdoctoral scholar at Southern Illinois University, applied a statistical technique called Maxent to identify the environmental conditions that best explain where gemsbok live.

Maxent works by comparing the conditions at known occurrence points against the broader landscape, effectively asking which combination of climate and terrain variables best predicts the species’ presence. For every gemsbok sighting, the researchers examined factors including temperature seasonality, precipitation patterns, vegetation cover, terrain ruggedness, and human population density. Once they had established the species’ habitat preferences, they searched for matching environmental signatures across space and projected them forward in time under future climate scenarios. The approach revealed something ecologically important: many habitat patches that today exist as isolated pockets are expected to coalesce into larger, more contiguous blocks of suitable land as the climate warms.

That connectivity matters because isolated patches act as natural barriers to spread. Kieran Andreoni, who began the research as a master’s student at Illinois and now serves as conservation director at the Southern Plains Land Trust in Colorado, explained that when habitat patches are disconnected, dispersal barriers may prevent animals from reaching the next patch. But when those patches merge, opportunities for invasion multiply. The models show this pattern particularly strongly in western Texas, as well as western New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of California, including Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth.

The reason gemsbok are likely to thrive where other large mammals struggle lies in their extraordinary evolutionary heritage. Native to the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, they are among the most drought-adapted large mammals on the planet. Bob Schooley, professor and head of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and a co-author of the study, noted that gemsbok can obtain all of their water from the plants they eat, meaning they do not need to drink at all. For an animal that can weigh 450 pounds, that level of water independence is exceptionally rare, and it positions the species as, in his words, the poster species for dealing with the kind of changes expected in the American Southwest.

Their advantages do not stop at physiology. When gemsbok were translocated from Africa, they left behind their natural predators, lions and hyenas. In their new range, southwestern predators such as coyotes and mountain lions kill far fewer gemsbok than their African counterparts would. The combination of superior arid-climate adaptation and relative freedom from predation creates a population with enormous potential for growth, particularly as warming and drying conditions increasingly stress the native species that share the landscape.

The most immediate ecological concern is competition for forage. Gemsbok herds eat many of the same plants as cattle and native ungulates such as pronghorn and bison, and as their numbers grow, they could substantially diminish food reserves for those species. Alexander added a further dimension to the problem: gemsbok can forage on lower-quality plant material than many native species. In drought years, when native animals may become stressed and nutrient deficient, gemsbok can shift to less nutritious vegetation and still persist. That asymmetry means the hardest years for native wildlife may be the easiest for the invaders.

The implications for ranching are equally stark. Schooley pointed out that desert rangelands are commonly used for cattle grazing, and during severe droughts ranchers pull their cattle off the land because there is nothing left for them to eat. No one pulls the gemsbok off. Given their ability to survive on low-quality forage, growing herds could severely damage the remaining grasslands precisely when those ecosystems are most vulnerable. There is also a disease dimension: gemsbok in the Southwest have tested positive for malignant catarrhal fever, bovine respiratory syncytial virus, and bovine para-influenza-3, all pathogens of concern to the cattle industry and potentially transmissible to native and domestic ungulates alike.

Managing the situation will not be simple. Gemsbok occupy a contested space in Southwestern land use: conservationists worry about native ecosystems, ranchers worry about forage and disease, and hunting operations value the animals as a trophy species that generates revenue. The Illinois researchers argue that navigating these competing interests will be tricky but critical if the region hopes to avoid the worst consequences of the spread. Their models provide a roadmap of where the expansion is most likely to occur, giving land managers a rare opportunity to act before isolated habitat patches coalesce into connected corridors. Whether that foresight translates into action may determine whether the gemsbok remains a curiosity of the New Mexican desert or becomes one of the defining invasive species of a warming North American West.

Subject of Research: Predicted climate-driven range expansion of introduced gemsbok (Oryx gazella) in the United States

Article Title: African gemsbok spreading in New Mexico: How far could they go under climate change?

Article References: African gemsbok spreading in New Mexico: How far could they go under climate change?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: gemsbok, oryx, invasive species, climate change, New Mexico, species distribution modeling, Maxent, drought adaptation, rangelands, wildlife management, Journal of Mammalogy, Southwest United States

The research team, led by Idrissa Sawadogo and colleagues, surveyed transhumant pastoralists, sedentary livestock keepers, and agro-pastoralists across twelve villages in the communes of Boudry and Mogtédo. The region sits in the Sudano-Sahelian belt, where mean annual rainfall ranges from 600 to 900 millimeters and temperatures swing between 24.5 and 30.8 degrees Celsius. Households were interviewed in French and in the local Moore and Fulfulde languages, with questions covering household demographics, perceptions of climate change, adaptation practices, and the barriers standing in their way. The average household head was 48 years old, 90 percent of respondents were male, and herds averaged roughly 90 animals, underscoring how deeply livelihoods depend on livestock.

Perceptions of a changing climate differed sharply by livelihood group. Among transhumant herders, 96.12 percent reported rising temperatures and increasingly intense heat, particularly between February and April, while agro-pastoralists were more worried about water: 68.32 percent reported declining rainfall and more frequent droughts. Sedentary keepers were split, with 71.21 percent observing hotter conditions but nearly 29 percent actually reporting increased rainfall. These divergent perceptions matter, the authors argue, because what herders perceive shapes what they do. A herder who sees heat as the enemy invests differently from one who sees drought coming.

Statistical analysis revealed that the pressures bearing down on pastoralists are not independent problems but tightly interlocked ones. A principal component analysis showed that fodder shortage, declining water points, and rising feed costs cluster together on a single dimension, suggesting a common underlying squeeze on resources. A second dimension captured mobility-related disruptions, such as obstructed livestock tracks and falling animal productivity. Correspondence analysis added a social layer: Fulani herders were strongly associated with fodder shortages, livestock diseases, and farmer-herder conflicts, reflecting their dependence on mobility and shared grazing lands, while Mossi households clustered near livestock mortality and declining fodder quality, and Gourmantche herders aligned with reduced productivity, pointing to structural constraints in herd management and market access.

The spatial story is perhaps the most striking. Mapping transhumance networks across Burkina Faso and into Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin revealed a structured north-south system: Sahelian zones function as departure areas, while the wetter Sudanian zones and coastal countries serve as dry-season destinations. But the map also exposed a troubling pattern. Conflict hotspots concentrate precisely along the transhumance corridors, especially in the agro-pastoral transition zones of central and southern Burkina Faso, where competition for grazing land, water points, and crop residues is fiercest. Road obstructions along key mobility axes compound the risk, turning what was once a fluid ecological strategy into a gauntlet of institutional and security barriers.

When asked why they change their transhumance destinations, herders gave an answer dominated by ecology but increasingly shaped by politics. A remarkable 98.23 percent cited fodder scarcity as the main driver, and 72.5 percent pointed to difficult access to water. Yet 68 percent cited road insecurity and 53.1 percent cited recurrent farmer-herder conflicts, while administrative constraints and high water costs added further friction. The authors interpret this as a structural transformation: the determinants of pastoral mobility, once almost purely climatic, are now increasingly socio-political, meaning that securing corridors requires governance reform as much as rangeland restoration.

To understand who adapts and how, the team employed a multivariate probit model, a statistical framework that jointly estimates eight separate adaptation choices while allowing their unobserved drivers to be correlated. This matters because herders do not pick strategies in isolation; they build portfolios. The model showed that livestock size was the most consistent and positive determinant, significantly boosting adoption of fodder storage, income diversification, feed supplementation, early livestock sales, and transhumance itself. Larger herds, in other words, provide the financial cushion and risk-bearing capacity needed to invest in climate resilience. Education was the second pillar, significantly increasing the likelihood of vaccination, fodder crop production, income diversification, and feed supplementation, reflecting better access to information and innovation. Gender also shaped decisions, while household size showed a limited negative effect, hinting at resource dilution in larger families.

The correlation matrix from the model delivered perhaps the study’s most encouraging insight: adaptation strategies are complementary, not substitutive. Transhumance correlated positively with income diversification (r = 0.399), early livestock sales (r = 0.331), and vaccination (r = 0.311), while fodder storage aligned with income diversification (r = 0.331). Households that move their herds also vaccinate, sell early, and diversify earnings. This portfolio-based risk management suggests that policies promoting a single strategy, such as building boreholes alone, may miss the synergies that make adaptation stick.

Adoption rates varied dramatically across production systems, revealing three distinct adaptation worlds. Preventive vaccination was nearly universal among transhumant herders at 88.30 percent, but feed supplementation told the inverse story: 49.21 percent of transhumant herders used it, compared with 97.32 percent of sedentary herders and 99.12 percent of agro-pastoralists. Fodder storage followed the same divide, practiced by 99.20 percent of sedentary herders but only 38.50 percent of transhumant ones. Fodder crop cultivation was almost absent among transhumant households at 8.15 percent, while transhumance itself was practiced by 100 percent of transhumant herders, 23 percent of agro-pastoralists, and no sedentary keepers. Cluster analysis then grouped households into three vulnerability profiles: those squeezed by water access who rely on long-distance cross-border movement, those losing grazing land who resort to informal grazing in protected areas, and those dominated by farmer-herder conflict amid agricultural expansion.

The policy implications are as concrete as they are urgent. The authors call for the legal protection and restoration of transhumance corridors, the development of strategic water points along pastoral routes, stronger climate and livestock advisory services, and fodder production initiatives suited to Sudano-Sahelian conditions. They also stress that only 21 percent of surveyed households held individual or state-recognized land rights, with most relying on customary arrangements, an insecurity that discourages long-term investment in pasture improvement. With low schooling levels and weak participation in collective organizations, only 11 percent belonged to pastoral groups, many households lack the human and social capital to seize available options. As climate change tightens its grip on the Sahel, the study concludes that protecting mobility, educating herders, and securing resource access are not separate goals but a single, interdependent agenda for keeping millions of livelihoods alive.

Subject of Research: Determinants of pastoral climate change adaptation strategies in West African rangelands

Article Title: Spatial constraints and drivers of pastoral adaptation to climate change in West African rangelands: A multivariate probit analysis

Article References: Sawadogo, I., Bayen, P., Kouassi, F. A., & Worou, O. N. (2026). Spatial constraints and drivers of pastoral adaptation to climate change in West African rangelands: A multivariate probit analysis. Environmental Challenges, 25, Article 101676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101676

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.envc.2026.101676

Keywords: pastoralism, transhumance, climate change adaptation, Burkina Faso, Sahel, rangelands, multivariate probit, farmer-herder conflict, livestock mobility, fodder scarcity, water access, land tenure

The research comes at a critical moment. Across Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, millions of pastoralists depend on cattle, sheep and goats grazing vast semi-arid rangelands. For these communities, livestock are far more than a source of income. They function as a family’s savings account, its food security and its cultural identity, often accumulated and passed down through generations. When drought kills a herd, it does not merely erase a season’s earnings; it can liquidate decades of household wealth in a matter of months, trapping families in poverty from which recovery may take years or may never come at all.

Lead author Dr Matt Clark, a Research Associate in Sustainability Science with the Thriving Oceans Research Hub in the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences, described climate variability as an inequity multiplier. If forecasts prove correct and a near-record El Niño develops, he said, the team expects the event to amplify inequalities across southern African rangelands. The core problem, he explained, is not that poor farmers lack climate information. It is that they often cannot afford to act on it. Wealthier producers can reduce herd sizes ahead of drought and rebuild when conditions improve, but many small-scale pastoralists simply do not have that financial buffer. Selling animals early means selling them cheap, and a depleted herd cannot regenerate quickly when rains return.

To understand how these dynamics play out at regional scale, the researchers built a detailed computational model representing pastoral communities across seven southern African countries. The model drew on projected rainfall patterns from European climate models together with empirical data on livestock populations, vegetation dynamics and community wealth. Rather than treating the region as a homogeneous whole, the simulation captured the decisions of thousands of individual livestock farmers operating under different climate conditions and different adaptation interventions. As the model settled into a stable state, wider patterns and the trade-offs between interventions emerged from the accumulation of those individual decisions, offering a level of granularity that broad regional averages cannot provide.

The team ran three simulations. The first represented a business-as-usual future, and its results were grim: increasing rainfall variability reduced household wealth, increased livestock losses, degraded grasslands and widened the gap between rich and poor. The second tested adaptation strategies in isolation. Access to improved forecasts alone delivered only modest benefits, because many households lacked the financial capacity to respond to the information they received. Risk-smoothing measures on their own, such as supplementary feed or insurance, could help households survive but sometimes forced environmental trade-offs, for example by keeping larger herds alive on already stressed landscapes.

The third simulation examined how adaptation spreads between neighbouring communities, drawing on conservation programs such as Conservation International’s Herding for Health initiative. Its findings were among the most encouraging of the study. When practical support accompanied climate information, communities learned from one another and adoption became self-reinforcing, providing a plausible pathway for climate adaptation at scale. In other words, the combination did more than add the benefits of each component; it created a social dynamic in which adaptation practices diffused organically through networks of neighbouring households, overcoming barriers that top-down programs have long struggled to breach.

The study identifies a suite of risk-smoothing measures that can make forecasts actionable: supplementary livestock feed, drought insurance, targeted financial support and improved market access. The logic is straightforward. A forecast warning of impending drought is only useful if a farmer can afford to sell animals at a fair price, buy feed to bridge the gap, or insure the herd against loss. By combining improved access to climate information with supported risk-smoothing, the researchers found, livestock farmers can avoid the environmental trade-offs that occur when either approach is used in isolation. The combination improved livelihoods, reduced inequality and protected rangelands simultaneously, overcoming trade-offs that have long challenged climate adaptation programs.

Dr Gina Arena, Science Lead for Herding for Health at Conservation International, emphasised that the communities involved are not passive in the face of a changing climate. It is not that the people the organisations work with are not thinking about adapting, she said; it is that greater uncertainty in climate brings greater risk, and communities need help identifying the best decisions and reducing the risk of implementing them. Research of this kind, she noted, helps do exactly that. Her comments underline a recurring theme in adaptation science: the bottleneck is rarely awareness or willingness, but the capacity to absorb the cost of a wrong decision in environments where a wrong decision can be catastrophic.

For Dr Clark, one of the most hopeful aspects of the findings is that they do not depend on inventing new technology. Weather forecasting is becoming increasingly accurate, he noted, and the opportunity now is to ensure those forecasts are paired with practical support so that the people who need them most can actually benefit. The framework developed for southern African pastoralists, he added, could equally be applied in Australia and other regions facing increasingly variable rainfall. As climate extremes become more common, adaptation needs to be as much about helping people act as about improving the forecasts themselves. That reframing shifts the policy conversation from a narrow focus on meteorological precision toward the socioeconomic infrastructure that determines whether precision matters.

The research was conducted through an international collaboration involving the University of Sydney, Imperial College London, Conservation South Africa, the South African Environmental Observation Network, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of California Merced and the Santa Fe Institute. Cosima Fröhner, a former Mary Lister McCammon Fellow at Imperial College London, cautioned against dismissing the modelling as abstract, pointing out that simulating the decisions of thousands of individual farmers under different climate conditions and interventions produces something very practical: a way to see, before real lives and real herds are at stake, which combinations of support actually work and which merely shift costs elsewhere. The researchers declare no conflicts of interest, and the study received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Research England and UK Research and Innovation. As El Niño conditions gather over the continent, the message for policymakers is unambiguous: information without the means to act is a warning unheard, and the communities least responsible for climate change remain the most exposed to its consequences unless adaptation programs close the gap between knowing and doing.

Subject of Research: Climate adaptation and inequality among pastoralist livestock farmers in southern African rangelands

Article Title: Improved climate forecasts alone won’t protect Africa’s poorest farmers

Article References: Improved climate forecasts alone won’t protect Africa’s poorest farmers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate change, El Niño, pastoralists, drought, rangelands, southern Africa, livestock, climate forecasts, risk-smoothing, Nature Sustainability, adaptation, inequality