Adaptation and Resilience in Rangeland Social-Ecological Systems August 2004

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Adaptation and Resilience in Rangeland
Social-Ecological SystemsAugust 2004

• Ryan McAllister , Yiheyis Maru, Nick Abel, Iain
  Gordon, Art Langston

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Research foci

• Social networks and social capital
• How do social networks effect the movement of
  livestock and landscape condition
• Pastoral decision making
• How do personal rules for making stocking
  decisions change in response to learning,
  financial and institutional drivers and landscape
  condition
• CSS versus SSS
• Do CSS methods better explain livestock movement,
  stocking decisions and landscape condition

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Overlapping scales of a conceptual grazing SES
Regional landscape condition
Landholder networks
Weather
Research monitoring
Landscape function
Enterprise
Landscapes
Land mgmt decisions
Livelihood function
Govt
Costs prices
Socioeconomic condition
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Data catching up to theory

• Rapid early progress in ABM of market and
  institutional influence on a conceptual grazing
  SES
• Extensive effort to capture historical data and
  societal understanding
• Dispersion of grazing pressure
• Land fragmentation and consolidation
• Stock transportation records
• Surveys to illuminate social networks
• Changes in tenure
• See website for papers

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Expansion of grazing pressure
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Land fragmentation and consolidation
CJ Stokes, AJ Ash, RRJ. McAllister 2004
Fragmentation of Australian Rangelands Australian
Rangeland Society Conference, Alice Springs 5-8
July.
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Social networks
19 of 68 pastoralists linked by 4 families
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Without subsidies
With subsidies
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New directions

• Western NSW case study dropped
• Intensive grazing case study added
• extensive versus intensive
• tenure
• enterprise cost structures
• density of social networks
• Alignment with other projects
• Social adaptation to ecological uncertainty in
  two Australian grazing systems