(All images from Astental, Großglockner Area, Carinthia, Austria, taken in 2024 and during last week - but situation similar in other parts of the Alps.)
The future of the hay meadows will depend on the willingness of the coming generations to continue to hard work - and on sufficient funding to make the systems economically viable for the land users. I am impressed by the young families keeping up the mowing here, but it's not easy.
Alternatively, former hay meadows are now grazed, and stocking densities are often so high that few flowering plants are seen.
At the same time, where possible (and we are speaking of altitudes around 2000 m a.s.l. already), more and more livestock owners apply slurry as fertilizer (greener areas - mown earlier). This leads to the disappearance of many plant and butterfly species.
Of course, a few species also benefit, such as this Lilium martagon, but mainly in early stages of abandonment.
At my current location in a pretty remote valley in Austria, abandonment, but also intensification, have kicked in again since ca. 2017. Abandoned hay meadows quickly lose they herb-rich appearance, and grasses soon dominate (often described in the literature). And yes, these slopes are steep!
I had assumed that some of these extremely biodiverse hay meadows ("Bergmähder") would persist in the long run. But speaking to the people who do the hard work, this seems less and less guaranteed.
These meadows had been maintained for centuries as #social-ecological systems, but were #abandoned and #intensified over large areas in the 1950s-1980s. However, due to tradition and conservation funding, unfertilized areas managed at low intensity still exist - biodiversity hotspots.
They also host a very high insect diversity and abundance, due to their high plant species richness and floral resources.
There is currently a lot of debate about #grazing vs. #mowing for #biodiversity - often polarized, with grazing seen as the holy grail and mowing as detrimental. I have long felt that it's not so much about one or the other, but about intensity and system. Well, here is another example:
Update on a new project on revitalizing coppice in Germany, from the Plieninger Lab ⬇️ I'm really looking forward to results from this one.
by Tobías Plieninger — Reposted by: Johannes Kamp
A warm welcome to our most recent social-ecological interactions group member, Pia Jensen! In this Medium blog post, Pia highlights the potential of traditional forest management (coppice forests) to meet current biodiversity and climate challenges in the forest sector. medium.com/people-natur...
Historical land uses, Community Forests and Local Perspectives
Coppice forests are a disappearing cultural landscape in Europe and Germany, but the importance of these historical forms of forest use is…
medium.com
plus: a lot of cattle dung is collected anyway by the villagers for heating and cooking, so is busted permanently into the atmosphere. I think it's very difficult to speculate here about livestock and carbon sequestration without any data at hand, and insight from other grassland systems is not....
Dung decays very slowly in this climate, and dung beetle densities are pretty low, so a lot of old dung actually burns (but again, there is little dung where it burns - for the reasons we outline in the paper).
well, plant-originating C has always been transported belowground by the numerous small mammals, but the area of high fire intensity does hardly overlap with the distribution of black soils (rather Kastanozems and Solonets/Solonchak soils there).
Reposted by: Johannes Kamp, Marten Winter
#Bird #surveys: Do we need to rewrite our methodological standards?
#PassiveAcousticMonitoring suggests that expert-based recommendations might lead to under-recording, due to diurnal and seasonal mismatches.
New paper led by David Singer; with 25,000 h audio data: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
#PassiveAcousticMonitoring suggests that expert-based recommendations might lead to under-recording, due to diurnal and seasonal mismatches.
New paper led by David Singer; with 25,000 h audio data: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
(e.g. of Stipa bunchgrasses) is accumulated belowground and therefore difficult to extract, iii) the C balance depends on grazing intensity and grazer type (e.g. horses vs. cattle), which have been so dynamic recently. I guess this will be studied eventually, but it's not so easy.
...combined livestock and fire effects on climate is difficult, because i) we don't know much about the fire-related C balance (how much C is emitted, how much returns to the system as "black carbon", e.g. soot, ash), ii) measuring C in steppe vegetation is difficult, because so much biomass...
Note that we don't say (and know) anything about the climate effects of livestock here. The main message of the paper is that livestock grazing controls fire fuel availability (but of course it's more complex, e.g. drought and precipitation have also in impact on fire patterns). Looking into....
Reposted by: Johannes Kamp
#Fieldwork update from our PyroDiv project (uni-goettingen.de/en/690609.html): A Kazakh-German field team is now collecting data on the Great Steppe to reveal the impact of fire legacies and grazing on biodiversity. Great collab between @acbk.bsky.social @consbiogoe.bsky.social and @uni-muenster.de.
Ganz so einfach ist es nicht, es gibt viele Gründe für Landnutzungsaufgabe - und resultierende Bestandsentwicklungen von Arten sind auch lange nicht immer negativ. Hier der dem o.a. feature zugrundeliegende Artikel: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Reposted by: Johannes Kamp
Long, exciting feature in @science.org today on land #abandonment, #rewilding and biodiversity by
@dancharles.bsky.social, covering our abandonment research across Europe and Kazakhstan. Based on interviews with Gergana and Johannes + site visit in Bulgaria. Free to read: bsky.app/profile/scie...
@dancharles.bsky.social, covering our abandonment research across Europe and Kazakhstan. Based on interviews with Gergana and Johannes + site visit in Bulgaria. Free to read: bsky.app/profile/scie...
Working from home before the start of the usual madness next week - window with a view!
First chapter of Anne Graser's PhD thesis now published⬇️
Stay tuned for another one on disturbance and birds using national bird monitoring data, and a third analysis on #moths, disturbance heterogeneity and deer again from the Harz mountains.
Stay tuned for another one on disturbance and birds using national bird monitoring data, and a third analysis on #moths, disturbance heterogeneity and deer again from the Harz mountains.
Reposted by: Johannes Kamp, David Leclère
New paper! Forest disturbance through drought, windthrow, pest outbreaks and fire is increasing in Europe, driven by past planting decisions and climate change. In Germany alone, more than 500,000 ha of mostly Spruce died back in 2018-2022. Led by Anne Graser, we studied biodiversity responses...
by Jens‐Christian Svenning — Reposted by: Johannes Kamp
Don't miss the next Blumenbach lecture in Göttingen! We are delighted that Jens-Christian Svenning agreed to speak about trophic #rewilding and will provide insights from and for #macroecology, #paleoecology and #conservation.
20 November, 5:15 p.m.
20 November, 5:15 p.m.
