Resource islands for creating diverse rangeland foodscapes

Beef ranchers must remain profitable while adapting to growing expectations for environmentally sound and socially responsible production. Although cattle evolved grazing diverse plant communities, contemporary herds on rangelands often subsist on monotonous grass diets that decline in nutritional value through summer and fall. This seasonal bottleneck disrupts nutrient cycling, increases supplementation costs, diminishes ecosystem services, and limits exposure to functional biochemicals or plant secondary compounds (PSCs) that support animal health. This review synthesises the foodscape concept and evaluates evidence for spatially distributed ‘resource islands’ of complementary plant functional groups as a strategy to address these limitations, illustrated through a case example translating principles into design and implementation. Establishing spatially distributed ‘resource islands’ of perennial legumes, forbs, and shrubs, species with higher nutrient density and beneficial PSCs, offers a low-cost strategy to enhance cattle performance while reducing environmental impacts. These islands can elevate forage quality, improve soil processes, and provide critical habitat services across monotonous landscapes. Implementing this approach requires integrating diverse disciplines such as plant chemistry, restoration science, landscape design, animal nutrition, and soil ecology with producer decision-making, and ranch-level social dynamics. Yet, deployment in semi-arid rangelands faces key constraints and research needs, including establishment costs, propagule and precipitation limitations, protection during early establishment, and added management complexity. We propose this transdisciplinary framework as a pathway to reconcile restoration of phytochemical and structural diversity with beef production and habitat provision, advancing a testable paradigm for sustainable rangeland management.