FAO and World Bank promote livestock rearing as a way of poverty alleviation and food security especially among rural poor. Villagers are usually involved in mixed crop-livestock farming. Interviews with villagers in the HableRud basin revealed that some changes have happened and comparing with past decades, fewer villagers keep livestock. They believed that number of villagers who kept livestock in pen has also drastically increased. This study was conducted to understand if natural capital holdings have any impact on villagers' dependence on rangeland or not and also to identify the important natural capitals contributing to villagers' dependency on rangeland, some unstructured and structured interviews with local people were conducted. Comparisons between the two groups of villagers namely, dependent and independent on rangeland in terms of the identified indicators, the independent samples T-test and Mann Whitney U were applied for parametric and nonparametric data, respectively. Then in order to predict likelihood of dependency of a villager on rangeland based on holding of or access to independent variables, binary logistic regression was applied using SPSS. Descriptive data analysis showed that just 177 villagers out of 380 samples were dependent on rangeland and the rest did not rely on rangeland at all. The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the two groups of dependent and independent villagers on rangelands in terms of grazing right, size of farm and orchard holding, number of small livestock, total livestock and total natural capital. But the best indicators to predict a villager's dependence on rangeland was decided to be grazing right, number of small livestock and size of farm. The study revealed that independent variables predict the odds (61% - 82%) that a villager will decide to keep livestock dependent on rangeland. Manuscript profile

Karim Saei was born in 1910, in Mashhad, north eastern Iran, where he got his diploma. He left behind his homeland for Karaj city to study at the Faculty of Agriculture of Tehran University. He passed his course very successfully and received his B.Sc. degree in 1931 followed by a scholarship to study for 2 years at Agronomic Institute in Montpellier, France. He graduated M.Sc. with excellent grade. Due to his brilliance during his study in France, Revue de bois magazine published an article about him, naming him a genius. Back to back with his study in France, he was granted another scholarship to study Forest statistics at University of California, Berkeley. He received his second M.Sc. in 1937 and returned back with a treasure of knowledge to serve his country. Soon he was recruited by Directorate of Agriculture. He founded Forest Office as the first body for forest management in Iran within the Directorate of Agriculture in 1938. Very soon, he became the head of Forest Office.His attempts to found Forestry Bureau, resulted in 1940 but still he believed that forests should be attached more attention and later on Directorate of Agriculture transformed to Ministry of Agriculture in 1941 and Forestry Bureau converted to Directorate of Forestry and 4 regional forestry offices established, respectively in Guilan, Tonekabon, Mazandaran and Gorgan under the supervision of Directorate of Agriculture in 1942. In 1949, he became the chair of Forest Corporation.Saei in collaboration with his colleagues formulated the forest act and delivered it to the parliament for ratification. He also suggested to the Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture of Tehran University to offer forestry, soon he started working there as the lecturer. The first estimate of forest area was also given by him in 1946. Manuscript profile