Dr. Brandon Bestelmeyer is a research ecologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Jornada Experimental Range and the Jornada Basin LTER at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He regularly writes about rangeland issues on the Land Ecology blog.

To read more of Brandon’s essays, visit http://landecology.org/.

“Land ecology” honors the holistic approach to the knowledge needed to support land stewardship into our increasingly uncertain future. Here we share an expanded version of one of Brandon’s recent essays.