6: Maintenance and enhancement of long-term multiple socio-economic benefits

Public perceptions, intentions, and behaviors influence cultural, legal, and public policy decisions toward the management, consumption, and preservation of natural resources. In order for rangeland management decisions to be socially sustainable (especially on public lands), they must achieve and retain some minimum threshold of acceptability with citizens. This indicator would provide for regular measurement of preferences, attitudes, and intentions with respect to rangelands (and potentially other natural resource-based lands such as forests).

Rangelands provide certain ecosystem services, the type and degree of which vary with intensity and type of domestic animal grazing. Ecosystem services are processes or attributes of ecosystems that result in benefits for humans. For example, maintenance and enhancement of flowering plants in rangelands could maintain pollinator species that then pollinate nearby flowering crops.

This indicates whether ranch families are earning a competitive rate of return from producing livestock on rangelands. If the rate of return on rangeland-based livestock operations is not competitive, it might indicate that other on-ranch forms of economic returns and/or lifestyle values are important, other off-ranch sources of income are important, or that the ranch is likely to be converted to other uses.

Recreation is an important social activity on rangelands and in forests. It can include many activities, but sight-seeing, wildlife-viewing, and walking/hiking are typically the most popular. This indicator is a measure of the support of particular areas for recreation activities.

Recreational areas include campgrounds, hiking/bicycling trails, wildlife-viewing areas, motorized recreation areas, and swimming areas. These are all important types of areas for outdoor recreational enjoyment of natural areas.

Communities may partly depend economically on ranching (non-confined raising of animals on rangelands) as a direct or indirect source of income and economic opportunity.

This indicator is envisioned as a way to address a problem inherent in simple measures of recreation use: rangeland sustainability is influenced by the ecological and social impacts of recreation use, and these impacts are not necessarily correlated with user density. Biophysical impacts of recreation typically follow a curvilinear pattern where marginal changes in impacts (e.g., soil compaction, change in plant species composition) become smaller as use levels increase. As a result, changes in visitor numbers may or may not indicate loss of additional value at the site level, depending on whether use is already low, moderate, or high. Social impacts of recreation – crowding, conflict between user groups, and depreciative behaviors (vandalism, littering, rule violation, etc.) – are more dependent on characteristics of the use and users than on simple numbers of users.

This provides a measure for the degree to which landowners are compensated for the provision of ecosystem services. This revenue could contribute to profitability of operations to keep lands in forest and range uses, for promoting management that emphasizes important ecosystem services, and for contributing to local economies. There are examples in California of programs that provide direct and/or indirect compensation to landowners for providing ecosystem services. Each of these provides a metric, which can be summed to get total dollar value.

This indicator measures the degree of dependence of ranch families on livestock production for household income. Surveys have shown few ranchers rely totally on the ranch for household income. Higher dependence on the ranch for income may relate to the level of grazing during drought and the ability (or inclination) to follow sustainable grazing practices that might affect ecological sustainability. testable hypothesis might be: As income dependence on the ranch increases, ecological sustainability may be negatively affected.

Many existing and new urban areas lack standardized approaches to adding, or requiring shade trees as part of an overall sustainability strategy. Standards provide a predictable tool to communicate with the public and devlopers about expectations for urban tree canopies.