Background and objective: Sustainable exploitation of natural resources plays an important role in providing livelihoods to rural and nomadic communities. Nowadays, indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources has prompted policy makers to adopt guidelines for their sustainable management. Among the factors influencing the rangeland degradation, is an imbalance between the number of livestock per hectare and the grazing capacity of the rangeland due to the production capacity of the rangeland. However, many livestock balance plans have been implemented in different parts of the country, it has not been studied much whether these plans actually have acceptable effects or achieved the desired goals. Therefore, the general aim of this study is to identify the effects of balancing livestock numbers and Identifying the Effects of balancing livestock numbers and rangeland carrying capacity from the view point of ranchers, the case of Central District of Kohgiluyeh County.
Materials and methods: The present study was carried out using a mixed method. In the qualitative section, sampling based on the principles of qualitative research continued until data saturation and then, started coding through content analysis. Using the data of qualitative section, a structured questionnaire was prepared. The face validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by subject experts and distributed among the studied samples. In addition, data analysis was performed using SPSSv21 software to categorize the concepts obtained from the first section
Results: The findings showed that from the respondents' view point, the implementation of the mentioned plan had several effects. Analysis of the data collected through content analysis and open coding indicated that these effects included 63 items. Then, to categorize the effects and to reduce the number of known variables and form new structures for them (based on the correlation between variables), exploratory factor analysis method has been used. The findings of factor analysis showed that only 39 of the indicators were extracted from the seven categories and explained 56.243% of the variance of variables used in factor analysis. Among these categorizes, the most effect was due to the psychosocial-educational factor, which explained 14.437% of the total variance.
Research constraints: Factors such as the lack of villagers at the time of the Census, the immigration of some ranchers and the severity of some areas were the research constraints.