Rangelands cover more of Earth's land surface than any other type of land. They have variable and harsh climates, are sparsely populated and remote from markets, produce significant quantities of livestock, and are mostly used and managed in common. Under this already unpredictable and harsh climate, pastoral peoples and rangelands face new and accelerating political, economic, and climatic stresses that challenge their coupled resilience and ability to adapt. In response, pastoralists are creating new ways to manage rangelands through conservancies and community-based institutions on state, common, and private land. In this review, we focus on recent advances in our understanding of rangeland social-ecological systems, as well as on the causes and consequences of change in these systems. We then explore how pastoral peoples, governments, and businesses are responding to these changes to build resilience to sustain both pastoralism and rangelands. We close with a description of unresolved issues, challenges, and questions for the future.

Collaborative and community-based monitoring are becoming more frequent, yet few studies have examined the process and outcomes of these monitoring approaches. We studied 18 collaborative or community-based ecological assessment or monitoring projects undertaken by five community-based forestry organizations (CBFs), to investigate the objectives, process, and outcomes of collaborative ecological monitoring by CBF organizations. We found that collaborative monitoring can lead to shared ecological understanding among diverse participants, build trust internally and credibility externally, foster social learning and community-building, and advance adaptive management. The CBFs experienced challenges in recruiting and sustaining community participation in monitoring, building needed technical capacity for monitoring, and communicating monitoring results back to the broader community. Our results suggest that involving diverse and sometimes adversarial interests at key points in the monitoring process can help resolve conflicts and advance social learning, while also strengthening the link between social and ecological systems by improving the information base for management and increasing collective awareness of the interdependence of human and natural forest communities

Summary: 1. Few studies have tested the applicability of current non‐equilibrium models of rangeland vegetation dynamics to a particular ecosystem, or across a range of systems that might be expected to respond differently to grazing. This study assessed the extent to which the non‐equilibrium persistent (NEP) model of rangeland vegetation dynamics applies to three distinct Mongolian rangeland ecosystems, the desert‐steppe, steppe and mountain‐steppe. 2. Standing biomass, vegetation cover and composition, and species richness and diversity were examined along grazing pressure gradients in ecological zones of differing productivity and interannual variability in precipitation. 3. In the desert‐steppe, biomass, functional group cover, richness and diversity did not vary along grazing pressure gradients, but all vegetation variables except the cover of weedy annuals and unpalatable forbs varied significantly between years. Vegetation dynamics in this zone largely conformed to the NEP model of rangeland dynamics. 4. In the mountain‐steppe, grass and total biomass, total vegetative cover, the cover of grasses, weedy annuals and unpalatable forbs, and richness and diversity varied along grazing pressure gradients. With increasing grazing pressure, grasses decreased and forbs and weedy annuals increased, as the conventional range condition (RC) model predicts. Interannual variation in precipitation influenced total vegetative cover, species and functional group cover, and richness and diversity. 5. In the steppe, forb biomass, grass, forb, unpalatable forb and weedy annual cover, and diversity varied along grazing pressure gradients. Grass biomass and total vegetative cover responded interactively to rainfall and grazing. Forb biomass, grass, forb and weedy annual cover and richness varied between years. Grasses decreased and forbs and weedy annuals increased with increasing grazing pressure, conforming to the RC model. 6. Ecosystem response to rainfall and grazing is complex, and interpretation of the response depends on the specific variables examined. The recent paradigm shift in rangeland science from the RC model to non‐equilibrium models has been embraced with such enthusiasm by some that the concept of non‐equilibrium rangelands may be as much in danger of being misapplied as equilibrium‐based models have been.