Southeastern New Mexico's rangelands are under stress due to a prolonged drought.

Atriplex lentiformis and Atriplex canescens are native forage halophytic shrub species.

In New Mexico and throughout the United States large amounts of water are generated daily during the extraction of oil and gas.

A. lentiformis and A. canescens grow in high soil salinity conditions, which infers they can be used for rangelands improvement.

Both these species could act as candidate crops for animal fodder grown in arid areas.

Increasing concern from both private citizens and intergovernmental organizations about the effects of climate change has led to regulatory and voluntary mechanisms aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including an emerging carbon credit market.

Despite the opportunities for landowners to diversify revenue streams within current operations, there are risks (i.e., production and financial, market, legal-transactional, and social) that could reduce landowner enrollment rates.

We used a systems thinking approach to map the feedback relationships among landowner decision-making considerations, soil system processes, and carbon credit market incentives.

Our findings illustrate the complex set of constraints of participation in carbon credit programs and how they interact by revealing a limits to growth archetype.

Landowners and crop and livestock producers are uniquely positioned to shape and develop the carbon credit market by filling the gap between equitable transaction participation for both carbon credit buyers and sellers looking to capture value from mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

Targeted grazing is a management strategy for fuel reduction and cheatgrass control in the Great Basin. However, concerns of cattle acting as endozoochorous seed dispersal agents of invasive grass species have been expressed.

In vitro and in situ techniques of ruminal fermentation and enzymatic digestion were employed to evaluate seed mortality.

Our results showed a nearly complete inhibition of germination after 36 hours in the rumen followed by 3 hours in the abomasum.

Our results indicate cattle grazing cheatgrass-infested rangelands will not spread cheatgrass seed via excrement.

Cheatgrass seeds consumed in the fall will have a slight lag in microbial degradation.