Grazing exclusion using fences is a key policy being applied by the Chinese government to rehabilitate degraded grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and elsewhere. However, there is a limited ...understanding of the effects of grazing exclusion on alpine ecosystem functions and services and its impacts on herders’ livelihoods. Our meta-analyses and questionnaire-based surveys revealed that grazing exclusion with fences was effective in promoting aboveground vegetation growth for up to four years in degraded alpine meadows and for up to eight years in the alpine steppes of the TP. Longer-term fencing did not bring any ecological and economic benefits. We also found that fencing hindered wildlife movement, increased grazing pressure in unfenced areas, lowered the satisfaction of herders, and rendered substantial financial costs to both regional and national governments. We recommend that traditional free grazing should be encouraged if applicable, short-term fencing (for 4–8 years) should be adopted in severely degraded grasslands, and fencing should be avoided in key wildlife habitat areas, especially the protected large mammal species.
The intensity of land use and management in permanent grasslands affects both biodiversity and important ecosystem services. Comprehensive knowledge about these intensities is a crucial factor for ...sustainable decision-making in landscape policy. For meadows, the management intensity can be described by proxies such as the mowing frequency, usually, a higher number of cuts indicate higher intensities. Dense time series of medium resolution (10–30 m) remote sensing data are suitable for the detection of mowing events. However, existing studies revealed a general lack of consensus about the most appropriate input data set for a consistent and reliable mowing detection.
We systematically evaluated the synergistic use of acquisitions from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Landsat 8 to detect the occurrence, frequency, and date of mowing events as an indicator of grassland management intensity. Dense time series of NDVI (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8), γ0 backscatter, backscatter cross-ratio, backscatter second-order texture metrics as well as 6-day interferometric coherence (Sentinel-1) were used as input features. All possible combinations of input features were tested to train a one-dimensional convolutional neural network, which enables enhanced exploitation of the temporal domain of the data. The evaluation was conducted on 64 meadows for an overall of 257 mowing events from 2017 to 2019 in Germany.
Our results revealed that the combination of input features improves the detection performance. The highest overall accuracy was reached by a combination of NDVI, backscatter cross-ratio, and interferometric coherence with an F1-Score of 0.84. The mowing frequency was predicted with a mean absolute error of 0.38 events per year, while the date of the events was missed by 3.79 days on average. NDVI time series alone mostly underperformed in comparison to optical/SAR combinations but clearly outperformed input-sets that were solely based on SAR features. The proposed model performed well for meadows with low to medium management intensities but further testing is recommended for highly intensive managed parcels.
The results clearly demonstrate the additional value of fusing time series of the three present Earth observation systems that deliver a freely available global coverage of the land surface at medium resolution.
•First study to combine S1, S2, and L8 time series for mowing detection.•Deep Learning method exploits the synergy of optical and SAR input features.•Combinations of optical and SAR input features improve detection results but.•Proper choice of input features considerably impacts the benefit.•Date of mowing is predicted with high accuracy.
Grassland ecosystems cover a large portion of Earths' surface and contain substantial amounts of soil organic carbon. Previous work has established that these soil carbon stocks are sensitive to ...management and land use changes: grazing, species composition, and mineral nutrient availability can lead to losses or gains of soil carbon. Because of the large annual carbon fluxes into and out of grassland systems, there has been growing interest in how changes in management might shift the net balance of these flows, stemming losses from degrading grasslands or managing systems to increase soil carbon stocks (i.e., carbon sequestration). A synthesis published in 2001 assembled data from hundreds of studies to document soil carbon responses to changes in management. Here we present a new synthesis that has integrated data from the hundreds of studies published after our previous work. These new data largely confirm our earlier conclusions: improved grazing management, fertilization, sowing legumes and improved grass species, irrigation, and conversion from cultivation all tend to lead to increased soil C, at rates ranging from 0.105 to more than 1 Mg C·ha⁻¹yr⁻¹. The new data include assessment of three new management practices: fire, silvopastoralism, and reclamation, although these studies are limited in number. The main area in which the new data are contrary to our previous synthesis is in conversion from native vegetation to grassland, where we find that across the studies the average rate of soil carbon stock change is low and not significant. The data in this synthesis confirm that improving grassland management practices and conversion from cropland to grassland improve soil carbon stocks.
Úvod Březina, Stanislav; Hrázský, Záboj; Janata, Tomáš ...
Opera Corcontica,
01/2017
54
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...we specify the aim of the presented publication and give an overview of its structure. ...it is focused on all decision makers in the field of protection of traditionally managed grasslands. in ...the first section of the publication, we show examples of good AMC practice mainly from abroad. ...the section closes with an introduction to internal meetings held by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Natuurmonumenten in the Netherlands as being an appropriate platform for sharing monitoring results with all the involved workers (Van Zuijen 2017). The final section of the publication describes the socio-economic context in which the management cycle proceeds in the Krkonoše Mts. it analyzes the basic pillar of current agricultural management in the Krkonoše Mts - the economy of sheep and cattle keeping with serious implications for setting agroenvi subsidies in mountain areas (Pražan 2017).
Meat consumption, health, and the environment Godfray, H Charles J; Aveyard, Paul; Garnett, Tara ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
07/2018, Letnik:
361, Številka:
6399
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Both the global average per capita consumption of meat and the total amount of meat consumed are rising, driven by increasing average individual incomes and by population growth. The consumption of ...different types of meat and meat products has substantial effects on people's health, and livestock production can have major negative effects on the environment. Here, we explore the evidence base for these assertions and the options policy-makers have should they wish to intervene to affect population meat consumption. We highlight where more research is required and the great importance of integrating insights from the natural and social sciences.
Understanding the functional genes of microorganisms involved in carbon cycling processes can link microbial community structure to potential ecological functions. However, the effects of grazing on ...the relationship between carbon cycling functional genes and soil environment need to be further investigated as a global land use activity. A replicated sheep grazing platform was established in Northern China in 2004 with four different stocking rates: no grazing (0 sheep ha−1 month−1), light grazing (0.15 sheep ha−1 month−1), moderate grazing (0.30 sheep ha−1 month−1), and heavy grazing (0.45 sheep ha−1 month−1). To examine the effects of biotic and abiotic factors on microbial species and functional gene abundance, we collected soil samples after 17 years of grazing analyzed for the abundance of microbial communities, the abundance of carbon function genes, plant carbon input and soil environmental factors. We found that light grazing reduced carbon cycling functional genes compared to no grazing (fencing). With increasing grazing intensity, the absolute abundance of functional genes increased. Changes in microbial species abundance were mainly responsible for the changes in the structure of carbon cycling functional genes. Our results emphasize that elucidating how grazing affects the carbon cycling functional genes through the effects of plant carbon inputs and the environment, and the interactions between them, will provide important information for understanding carbon cycling processes in grassland ecosystems.
•Light grazing reduced carbon cycling functional genes.•With increasing grazing intensity, the abundance of functional genes increased.•Light grazing maintained a balanced carbon cycle/total gene ratio.•Heavy grazing increased the abundance of oligotrophs bacteria.•Lower carbon sources and poor environments caused by grazing affect functional genes.
Land-use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss. However, understanding how different components of land use drive biodiversity loss requires the investigation of multiple trophic ...levels across spatial scales. Using data from 150 agricultural grasslands in central Europe, we assess the influence of multiple components of local- and landscape-level land use on more than 4,000 above- and belowground taxa, spanning 20 trophic groups. Plot-level land-use intensity is strongly and negatively associated with aboveground trophic groups, but positively or not associated with belowground trophic groups. Meanwhile, both above- and belowground trophic groups respond to landscape-level land use, but to different drivers: aboveground diversity of grasslands is promoted by diverse surrounding land-cover, while belowground diversity is positively related to a high permanent forest cover in the surrounding landscape. These results highlight a role of landscape-level land use in shaping belowground communities, and suggest that revised agroecosystem management strategies are needed to conserve whole-ecosystem biodiversity.
Increasing plant diversity can increase ecosystem functioning, stability, and services in both natural and managed grasslands, but the effects of herbivore diversity, and especially of livestock ...diversity, remain underexplored. Given that managed grazing is the most extensive land use worldwide, and that land managers can readily change livestock diversity, we experimentally tested how livestock diversification (sheep, cattle, or both) influenced multidiversity (the diversity of plants, insects, soil microbes, and nematodes) and ecosystem multifunctionality (including plant biomass production, plant leaf N and P, above-ground insect abundance, nutrient cycling, soil C stocks, water regulation, and plant–microbe symbiosis) in the world’s largest remaining grassland. We also considered the potential dependence of ecosystem multifunctionality on multidiversity. We found that livestock diversification substantially increased ecosystem multifunctionality by increasing multidiversity. The link between multidiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality was always stronger than the link between single diversity components and functions. Our work provides insights into the importance of multitrophic diversity to maintain multifunctionality in managed ecosystems and suggests that diversifying livestock could promote both multidiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality in an increasingly managed world.
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