Livestock grazing impacts on plateau pika (Ochotona curzoniae) vary by species identity

Abstract

Livestock and small burrowing mammals are potential ecosystem engineers and major drivers of ecosystem processes. Small mammals, often considered competitors with livestock, have been reported to increase in recent years and have been identified for their negative impacts on ecosystem services such as plant production and soil carbon sequestration.However, these increases and impacts by small mammals have rarely been studied with respect to how they may be influenced by livestock grazing. Here we experimentally manipulated large enclosures on the alpine grassland of Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, each with different livestock assemblages: yak (Bos grunniens), Tibetan sheep (Ovis aries), mixed populations of yak and sheep, and a control plot containing no livestock to study the potential impacts of livestock on the dominant small mammalian herbivore in the region, the plateau pikas (Ochotona curzoniae). We found that during the period of peak vegetative growth all pika populations in livestock experimental plots increased compared with those in the control plots. Additionally, pika populations and active pika burrow density increased more in experimental plots containing yaks compared with the sheep-only experimental plots. These results provide evidence that livestock grazing can increase the risk of pika outbreaks, which has led to this species being classified as a pest and subject to widespread control measures.We suggest explicitly incorporating livestock species identity in addition to grazing intensity and duration into management considerations to ensure maintenance of native biodiversity and long-term sustainability on the alpine grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau.

Friend and foe? The effects of grassland management on global patterns of spider diversity

“…However, grazing by one or more herds may enhance the multifunctionality and multidiversity in grassland ecosystems, thus causing an effect comparable to intermediate impacts (McGregor, 2010;Clement et al, 2018;. Such trend can be observed in the diversity of plant communities (Ross et al, 2016;Pakeman et al, 2019), flies (Clement et al, 2018), butterflies (Fraser et al, 2014), rodents (Evans et al, 2015;Li et al, 2019b), and birds (Fraser et al, 2014;Evans et al, 2015). This effect may have been observed only on Ambush hunters and Other hunters because, even though these guilds are known to hunt on the surface of flowers and leaves, with a higher dominance of families like Thomisidae and Salticidae than other families, they are also capable of adopting hunting strategies on the ground and other substrates, thus not relying only in one type of vegetation structure (Gomes et al, 2018;Joseph et al, 2018;Lyons et al, 2018b,c;da Silva Bomfim et al, 2021).…”

Modeling the Spatial Distribution of Plateau Pika (Ochotona curzoniae) in the Qinghai Lake Basin, China

“…Moreover, high levels of livestock grazing could benefit plateau pika populations by increasing erosion and creating additional burrowing opportunities for plateau pikas [14]. Li et al also revealed that livestock grazing could increase the risk of plateau pika outbreaks, due to it reducing the vegetation height and diminishing the plateau pika predation risk [15]. Lots of previous studies demonstrated that proper plateau pika density is beneficial to the entire ecosystem [9,10], but the fragment of suitable habitat for plateau pika may cause its population to rise and accelerate rangeland degradation, because dispersal is an infrequent event for plateau pika [3].…”

“…Moreover, it is still a controversy what the role human activities play on the blast and distribution of plateau pika [4,13]. On one hand, human activities such as overgrazing may accelerate the degradation of rangeland, offering a potential suitable habitat for plateau pika [14,15], while Zhou et al revealed that the road has played some barrier effect on the genetic interaction between the plateau pikas that inhabited the two sides of the Qinghai–Tibet Highway [16]. On the other hand, chemical and biological technology has been used to reduce the population of plateau pika year by year; however, it would recover rapidly [3,17].…”

Herbivore Assemblage as an Important Factor Modulating Grazing Effects on Ecosystem Carbon Fluxes in a Meadow Steppe in Northeast China

“…Moreover, because high‐diversity community can provide more food resources and foraging niche differentiation for sheep and cattle (Feng, 2014), mixed grazing of sheep and cattle had no effect on plant diversity in this community, and relative abundance of forbs and grasses under mixed grazing was between that under sheep single grazing and that under cattle single grazing. In the low‐diversity community, sheep's foraging for forbs were facilitated by cattle's foraging for grasses due to the limitation of available food resources (Li et al, 2019; Liu et al, 2016); thus, mixed grazing decreased plant diversity and relative abundance of forbs and increased relative abundance of grasses.…”