Many rangelands worldwide are undergoing shifts from grass-dominated systems to woody-plant dominated shrublands or forests. Resilience theory has emerged as a framework for designing management aimed at avoiding or disrupting the progression of grasslands to shrublands or woodlands. However, environmental laws and policies often pose major challenges to operationalizing resilience in management. Environmental laws can have disparate and competing aims and typically have a narrow focus, based on ecological concepts developed in systems near equilibrium, which results in environmental policy that is incompatible with managing for ecological resilience. We build on previous research that linked well-established models from applied fire physics with a widely applied ecological positive feedback model of woody plant encroachment to identify laws that limit the development of effective resilience-based frameworks for managing the grassland to woody plant ecosystem shift in rangelands of the Great Plains, USA.
Results/Conclusions
Our model identified laws that limited both the temporal window available to managers for conducting fires, and the spatial extent of fire application. These limitations curtail the potential for developing effective resilience-based management frameworks on rangelands. Laws with rigid limitations on the timing for conducting fire management were the least congruent with resilience-based management. Laws explicitly recognizing the importance of ecological process in managing for resilient rangelands, which thereby allow for the maintenance of cross-scale connections and the generation of adaptive capacity in governance, resulted in the greatest potential for reducing shifts from grass-dominated to woody-dominated systems. Research on linkages between law and ecological resilience is essential to developing environmental policy that does not impinge on the application of resilience-based management and avoiding ecosystem state shifts.