Changes in the diversity and species composition of a seminatural saline pasture under different grassland management regimes
Abstract
The Eurasian forest-steppe that covers a large part of the Carpathian Basin was home to a dominant grassland forage-based livestock production for several decades. In the 21st century, the area of grassland under grassland management, now abandoned, is increasing as a result of steadily declining grazing livestock numbers and limited support for grassland use for conservation purposes. At the same time, overgrazing in pasture gardens established to address labour shortages is causing depletion. In our study, we followed the changes in diversity and species composition of an externally managed semi-natural grassland under different management regimes. In an experiment launched in 2009 on the Hungarian Great Plain in a meadow with transitional grassland association between Agrostio stoloniferae-Alopecuretum pratensis and Achilleo setaceae-Festucetum pseudovinae, the treatments applied were zero-utilisation (neither grazed nor mowed), mowing, meadow grazing (mowing and sheep grazing) and overgrazing. Of the complete 11-year period of the experiment, the last 4 years (2017–2020) were studied. Once a year, a phytocoenological survey was carried out, recording the cover of each plant species. Our results showed that Shannon diversity was significantly higher in the overgrazed and meadow-grassland areas than in the zero utilisation or mowed grassland, mainly due to differences in species numbers. The meadow grassland was the most species-rich with 29 plant species over the 4 years of the study, while the most species-poor was the zero utilisation grassland with only 6 species in 2017. Evenness values differed little between treatments. The Shannon diversity value did not change significantly over the 4 years of the study within a given grassland utilisation. In the mowing and zero utilisation treatments, the proportion of grasses in species number and total cover was higher than in the meadow and overgrazed treatments. The cover of the tall grass Alopecurus pratensis dominant in the mowing and meadow treatments decreased to below 10% in the overgrazed grassland. With increasing grazing intensity, an advance of the short grass Festuca pseudovina was observed. At zero utilisation, Rosa canina causes shrub encroachment. The annual grass Hordeum murinum appeared only in the overgrazing treatment, and its cover increased from 13.5% to 22.9% between 2017 and 2020, which may already represent a significant potential for animal health risk. The results of our research suggest that, under similar climatic and soil conditions to the habitat under study, meadow management practices are the most likely to maintain the original diversity of semi-natural grassland associations.
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