High species richness of sheep-grazed sand pastures is drivenby disturbance-tolerant and weedy short-lived species

Kovacsics-Vári, Gergely and Sonkoly, Judit and Tóth, Katalin and McIntoshné Buday, Andrea and Díaz Cando, Patricia Elizabeth and Törő-Szijgyártó, Viktória and Balogh, Nóra and Guallichico Suntaxi, Luis Roberto and Espinoza Ami, Francis David and Matus, Gábor and Tóthmérész, Béla and Török, Péter (2024) High species richness of sheep-grazed sand pastures is drivenby disturbance-tolerant and weedy short-lived species. ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION, 14 (9). No.-e70282. ISSN 2045-7758

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Abstract

We selected 15 sheep-grazed sand pastures along a gradient of increasing grazingintensity to study the fine-scale patterns of main biomass fractions (green biomass,litter) and that of plant species and functional groups (life forms and social behaviourtypes). We classified them into five grazing intensity levels based on stocking density,proximity to drinking and resting places and the number of faeces. We aimed to an-swer the following questions: (i) How does increasing intensity of sheep grazing af-fect the amount of green biomass, the species richness and their relationship in sandpastures? (ii) How does increasing intensity of sheep grazing affect the biomass ofperennial and short-lived graminoids and forbs? (iii) How does the disturbance value—expressed in the biomass ratio of disturbance-tolerant and ruderal species—changealong the gradient of grazing intensity? A unimodal relationship between green bio-mass and species richness was detected; however, the ordination (canonical corre-spondence analysis, CCA) showed no clustering of pastures subjected to the samelevels of grazing intensity. Along the grazing intensity gradient we found an increas-ing trend in species richness and significant differences in green biomass (decreasingtrend), litter (decreasing trend), graminoids (decreasing trend) and short-lived forbs(increasing trend). We found an increasing amount of disturbance-tolerant and rud-eral species with increasing grazing intensity. We suggest that we might need to usemultiple scales for sampling and a fine-scale assessment of grazing intensity. Our find-ings might be instructive for pastures in densely populated regions, which are proneto the encroachment of disturbance-tolerant and ruderal species.

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