Increasing demand for agricultural products is driving grassland management intensification with subsequent impacts on ecosystem services and disservices. Key questions related to grassland production as well as environmental and social concerns must be addressed to ensure sustainability. We propose a unified perspective, addressing numerous trade‐offs and synergies between grassland ecosystem services and disservices, and considering an array of ecological and human consequences associated with history and ongoing shifts in management strategies. Much of our discussion utilizes evidence from humid grasslands; however, our examples and recommendations have global implications for the future of grassland management. We characterize four categories of ecosystem services and disservices (provisioning, supporting, regulating, and cultural) provided by perennial grasslands that are extensively managed (low or no input, never cultivated) or intensively managed (high‐input, cultivated). We explore a range of potential outcomes following transition from extensive to intensive agroecosystems around the globe. Additionally, we suggest specific research priorities to better evaluate ecosystem services and disservices across management intensities. Finally, we highlight potential benefits of landscape mosaics that include grasslands across a continuum of extensive to intensive strategies.

Automated head chamber systems (AHCS; GreenFeed, C-Lock inc., Rapid City, SD) increasingly are being used for measuring gas flux of unrestrained cattle. There are a wide range of recommendations for what constitutes a “good” visit (i.e., duration) to an AHCS and how many visits are required for the AHCS to quantify gas fluxes accurately and precisely. Accordingly, the purpose of this experiment was to investigate the effects of visit duration thresholds and the subsequent effects of these thresholds on the number of visits needed to provide adequate estimates of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) emissions, and oxygen (O₂) consumption by beef cattle. This analysis utilized data from 3 previously published experiments with grazing beef steers and 1 experiment with finishing beef steers, with 103 steers total. When comparing all available visits, there was excellent agreement [Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) ≥ 0.96] between visits ≥3 min in duration and those ≥2 min for the three gases in all four experiments. When data from all 4 experiments were pooled, there was excellent agreement between visits ≥3 min and those ≥2 min and ≥1 min for all gases (CCC ≥ 0.96). These results suggest that estimates from visits ≥2 min are like those from visits ≥3 min. Next, we investigated if including visits ≥2 min or ≥1 min would increase the minimal number of visits required to provide excellent agreement with the “gold-standard” (mean of all visits ≥3 min). For this, we used only one of the experiments and randomly selected visits per animal ranging from n = 5-60, in increments of 5. The sole experiment was used because all animals had more than 60 visits. We then assessed the agreement between the “gold-standard” [mean of all visits ≥3 min (144 ± 55.01 visits per steer)] estimates of CO₂, O₂, and CH₄. The minimum number of visits required to achieve excellent agreement (CCC ≥ 0.90) to the “gold-standard” estimate for all gases was 30 visits ≥3 min in duration, or 40 visits ≥2 min in duration. Visits ≥1 min in duration did not achieve excellent agreement, even when 60 were used. Based on these results, we recommend excluding visits < 3 min in duration with 30 minimum visit records per animal. However, if researchers choose to implement a 2-min visit duration threshold then 40 visit records are needed per animal.