Grassland with tradition: sampling across several scientific disciplines

Abstract

The traditional, low-input use of grassland in Central and Eastern Europe has provided high-quality food, clothing and manure for millennia. As an outcome of sustainable low-intensity agriculture, some rural areas have globally significant species richness. Traditional farming is still well preserved in several regions of the Carpathian Mountains. This is a unique opportunity to use the wisdom of our ancestors to keep grassland biodiversity for our descendants. We present a sampling methodology to survey traditionally managed grassland ecosystems holistically, including abiotic, biological and cultural phenomena, and reflect thus the multidimensionality of traditional farming. Our main objective was to reveal the connection between particular management practices and precisely measured plot plant diversity. Our motivation was to identify traditional farming approaches that result in both high biodiversity and sustainable grassland utilization in particular region, and confirm their impact also using statistical tests. The multitaxon vegetation sampling at seven spatial scales combined with soil analyses, detailed land-use information derived from interviews with the land parcel owners, satellite pictures and historical materials provide potentially valuable data for several scientific disciplines including syntaxonomy, plant ecology, environmental anthropology and ethnology. Examples of grassland management practices based on traditional ecological knowledge can serve as an inspiration for developing modern biodiversity conservation strategies applicable for rural regions. The database Grassland with Tradition is registered in Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD) with the identifier ID EU-00-032. To date it contains data from 31 study sites in 7 countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Ukraine). Syntaxonomic reference: Mucina et al. (2016).

Conservation with local people: medicinal plants as cultural keystone species in the Southern Alps

“…Conventional biodiversity conservation focuses on ecological parameters (Garibaldi 2009), i.e., plant and animal species that represent the ecological functioning, stability, and integrity of an ecosystem (Caro and Girling 2010). However, these parameters often overlook or neglect cultural aspects of the ecosystem's genesis that is frequently strongly shaped by local culture and land-use history (Hunn et al 2010, Zerbe 2019, Janišová et al 2021. For example, extensively managed grasslands, so-called "low-input grasslands," in Central Europe are shaped by centuries to millennia of land use (Hejcman et al 2013, Bonari et al 2017, Leuschner and Ellenberg 2017, and yet they persist and enjoy extraordinary species richness (Wilson et al 2012, Habel et al 2013, Chytrý et al 2015.…”

Determinants of bryophyte assemblages in traditionally managed grasslands of the Carpathian Mts

“…Each site was stratified by slope inclination (three levels: flat, moderately steep, steep) and slope exposition (two levels: W‐N‐E, E‐S‐W). For our specific purpose, we defined flat areas as having inclination up to 5°, moderately steep slopes between 5 and 25°, and steep slopes above 25° (for sites/villages with finely modeled relief a threshold of 15° was used; Janišová et al, 2021). In each combination of inclination and exposition, we randomly placed a single 10‐m 2 plot in a homogeneous vegetation patch; thus having six plots in each site (Figure 1).…”

“…Information on the management practices was obtained via semi‐structural interviews with the local farmers, landowners, and/or their neighbors (Janišová et al, 2021). Our questions focused on agricultural practices used during three time periods: (i) since 2010 (recent time); (ii) 1950–1990 (the period of centrally planned economy in all investigated countries except Austria); and (iii) 1990–2010 (the period of market economy in all investigated countries).…”

“…This has ultimately led to changes in species composition and a significant decline in species diversity of these habitats (Gossner et al, 2016;Maurer et al, 2006;Melts et al, 2018). While most grasslands in Western and Northern Europe were abandoned or intensified decades ago (MacDonald et al, 2000;Dengler & Tischew, 2018), species-rich traditionally managed grasslands are still relatively widespread in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in the Carpathian Mts (Babai & Molnár, 2014;Török et al, 2018;Janišová et al, 2020Janišová et al, , 2021.…”

Vegetation Classification and Survey in the third year

“…A second article type, which is very attractive to authors and readers as it can make a large scientific impact, are methodological papers, called VCS Methods in our journal. No VCS Methods paper was published in 2022, but there was one in 2021 (Janišová et al 2021) on sampling vegetation together with farmer interviews, highlighted in our last editorial (Dengler et al 2022), and there is one that is published in early 2023: Dengler et al (2023) present the Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE), a comprehensive indicator values system for nearly 15,000 vascular plant taxa in Europe and adjacent areas which they derived by mathematically matching the information of 31 source systems from across Europe into a single consensus system. While this system was mainly developed to support continent-wide classification and macroecological studies of vegetation, first tests indicate that it also might work well in regional contexts.…”