How mowing restores montane Mediterranean grasslands following cessation of traditional livestock grazing

The Biodiversity Promotion Areas: effectiveness of agricultural direct payments on plant diversity conservation in the semi-natural grasslands of the Southern Swiss Alps

“…rupestre type was the only one significantly associated to BPA. It is worth mentioning that B. rupestre is a summer drought stress tolerant tall-grass encroaching mountain grasslands when agro-pastoral management is strongly reduced and/or totally abandoned, causing a sharp decline of biodiversity and forage quality when it becomes dominant within the vegetation community (Cavallero et al 2007;Tardella et al 2020). However, a regular and extensive disturbance management, such as the cutting/grazing regimes implemented within BPA, is recommended to reduce its dominance and maintain good level of vascular plant diversity (Tardella et al 2020).…”

“…It is worth mentioning that B. rupestre is a summer drought stress tolerant tall-grass encroaching mountain grasslands when agro-pastoral management is strongly reduced and/or totally abandoned, causing a sharp decline of biodiversity and forage quality when it becomes dominant within the vegetation community (Cavallero et al 2007;Tardella et al 2020). However, a regular and extensive disturbance management, such as the cutting/grazing regimes implemented within BPA, is recommended to reduce its dominance and maintain good level of vascular plant diversity (Tardella et al 2020). Moreover, the regular and extensive BPA disturbance management proved to be efficient in avoiding the risk of natural succession towards communities dominated by tree and shrub species, as indicated by the low number and cover of typical shrubland-woodland and heathland species (Table 4).…”

“…Indeed, the higher temperatures are determining a shift in grassland plant phenology all over the Alps, resulting in a marked advancement of the mean phenological stages for many species, accounting to 2-3 days every 10 years (Vuffray et al 2016), and this process is foreseen to accelerate in the next decades, together with an increase of summer droughts, above all in the Southern Swiss Alps (Croci-Maspoli et al 2018). Consequently, keeping inflexible mowing dates in the next future would probably determine a decrease in the quality of forage deriving from BPA as a result of too advanced phenological stages and a dominance of summer drought stress tolerant grasses of low forage quality, such as B. rupestre and typically associated late-flowering tall herbs (Tardella et al 2020). For this reason, it could also have potential impacts on species community composition, resulting in a lower acceptance of this biodiversity-based scheme by farmers.…”

Land‐use legacies limit the effectiveness of switches in disturbance type to restore endangered grasslands

“…Many grassland studies have compared the effects of different disturbance types on native diversity and composition (e.g. Collins et al 1998; MacDougall & Turkington 2007; Tardella et al 2020; Vermeire et al 2020). While often the historical management regime is seen as desirable, there may be practical limitations to implementation and/or the ecosystem may have shifted significantly such that historical management is no longer optimal (MacDougall & Turkington 2007; Valkó et al 2014).…”

“…In some cases, different disturbances are substitutable as they affect diversity through the same mechanisms, i.e. alleviating light limitation (Collins et al 1998; MacDougall & Turkington 2007; Tardella et al 2020), whereas in other studies this has been not the case (Catorci et al 2014; Vermeire et al 2020). In many cases, the reintroduction of traditional management that has been abandoned is compared with other practical alternatives.…”