How resilient are US rangeland ecosystems?

While “resilience” has become a buzzword in agriculture and land management circles, notably as a framework for the response to climate change, there has not been a clear path as to how to organize and deploy a range of resilience-related ideas, tools, and practices to improve climate change response. Generic statements about the need for improved resilience are common, and programs to help enhance resilience are common as a basis for policy development and implementation. These initiatives include references to a range of “climate-smart practices” that should be encouraged, but because they are national strategies, they seldom go beyond general principles. Land management requires a level of spatiotemporal precision in decision-making, planning, and application that calls for much more than broad principles and generic practice. This paper reviews the concepts that have made resilience an important part of land management goals across policy, programs, and application; demonstrates how those concepts can be organized and applied to decision-making to respond to climate change on rangelands; and finally, proposes some approaches that can help improve the value of a resilience-based approach.