Patterns of rangeland productivity and land ownership: Implications for conservation and management

Rangelands cover 40–50% of the Earth's terrestrial surface. While often characterized by limited, yet variable resource availability, rangelands are vital for humans, providing numerous ecosystem goods and services. In the conterminous United States (CONUS), the dominant component of rangeland conservation is a network of public rangelands, concentrated in the west. Public rangelands are interspersed with private and tribal rangelands resulting in a complex mosaic of land tenure and management priorities. We quantify ownership patterns of rangeland production at multiple scales across CONUS and find that both total production and average productivity of private rangelands is more than twice that of public and tribal rangelands. At finer scales, private rangelands are consistently more productive than their public counterparts. We also demonstrate an inverse relationship between public rangeland acreage and productivity. While conserving acreage is crucial to rangeland conservation, just as critical are broad‐scale ecological patterns and processes that sustain ecosystem services. Across CONUS, ownership regimes capture distinct elements of these patterns and services, demonstrated through disparate production dynamics. As ownership determines the range of feasible conservation actions, and the technical and financial resources available to implement them, understanding ownership‐production dynamics is critical for effective and sustained conservation of rangeland ecosystem services. … conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest. —Leopold 1934 Rangelands are often described as uncultivated land dominated by grasses, forbs, and shrubs and suitable for grazing animals, inclusive of both livestock and wildlife (Briske 2017). Extensive and important systems, rangelands cover 40–50% of the Earth's ice‐free land surface and provide vital ecosystem services (Sala et al. 2017): rangelands store approximately 10–30% of the world's terrestrial carbon (Derner et al. 2006, Booker et al. 2013), are a source of water and animal protein for roughly two billion people (Havstad et al. 2009), and are rich in biodiversity (Havstad et al. 2009). While rangelands occur globally across wide ranges of climatic conditions, many intact rangelands (i.e., those not cultivated or otherwise developed) occur in regions with limited water and nutrient availability. Moreover, rangelands are coupled socioecological systems, shaped through interdependent land use practices and ecological processes (Havstad et al. 2009,