Grazing intensity affected spatial patterns of vegetation and soil fertility in a desert steppe

The effects of grazing on the spatial pattern of elm (<i>Ulmus pumila</i> L.) in the sparse woodland steppe of Horqin Sandy Land in northeastern China

“…Here, the distance between the clustered and uniform patterns within grazed and fenced plots was 1.87 and 1.58 m, respectively. This was consistent with work by Lin et al (2010), who found that grazing altered the fine-scale (< 2 m) processes in a desert steppe in Inner Mongolia, China. However, in our study the increase in distance between the random and clustered pattern occurred in an orderly way, rather than the clustered patterns appearing on a fine scale and random patterns occurring on a relatively large scale as reported previously (Niu et al, 2008;Ren and Zhao, 2013).…”

Grazing effects on soil characteristics and vegetation of grassland in northern China

“…Grazing increased spatial heterogeneity of vegetation (total vegetation cover) and soil properties (SOC, TN and the proportion of sand, silt and clay) in the semi-arid shrublands of northern Patagonia in South America (Kröpfl et al, 2013). However, results of Lin et al (2010) showed that neither SOC nor soil N responded to grazing intensity at a large scale (1-18 m) but that overgrazing increased vegetation fragmentation (< 2 m) in desert steppe of northern China. In a grazed ecosystem in Yellowstone National Park, grazing animals increased diversity of plant species at a fine scale (20 × 20 cm) and altered the distribution of soil N across a topographic gradient at large spatial scales (5-30 m) with soil N properties exhibiting increased variance among sampling points at increasing distances from 5 to 30 m. Ungrazed grasslands exhibited no spatial structure in soil N distribution with no topographic correlation (Augustine and Frank, 2001).…”

“…Grazing intensity is a key management variable that influences the structure and composition of grassland ecosystems (Hickman et al, 2004;Bestelmeyer et al, 2009;Lin et al, 2010). In tallgrass prairie, grazing significantly increased species richness, diversity and forb cover (Hickman et al, 2004;Koerner and Collins, 2013).…”

“…In subalpine grassland in the eastern Pyrenees (Andorra), heavy grazing increased species richness and diversity, but decreased forage quality and production (Komac et al, 2014). Overgrazing has profound effects on important ecosystem characteristics, such as water erosion (Cerdà and Lavee, 1999), soil water content (SWC) (Lin et al, 2010), soil organic carbon (SOC) (Su et al, 2006;Costa et al, 2015), total nitrogen (TN) (Augus- tine and Frank, 2001;Lin et al, 2010;Hirobe et al, 2013), plant species richness and diversity (Gibson, 1988;Hickman et al, 2004;Ren et al, 2012;Angassa, 2014), belowground bud bank (Qian et al, 2014) and ecosystem stability (Su et al, 2006;Ren et al, 2012). However, the effects of livestock grazing on soil heterogeneity have not been consistent -with some studies showing that overgrazing increased soil heterogeneity of TN, SOC and fine soil proportion (Schlesinger et al, 1990;Su et al, 2006), while other studies reported that soil heterogeneity and vegetation diversity decreased from a patchy to a homogeneous distribution with increased grazing intensity (e.g., Zhao et al, 2011).…”

Evaluating the lingering effect of livestock grazing on functional potentials of microbial communities in Tibetan grassland soils

“…Nevertheless, this area is typical of a Tibetan grassland landscape and climate. Because general changes in functional gene compositions of the microbial community are modified by local, regional, and temporal variations (Lin et al 2010;Su et al 2006), it would be interesting to expand the observations in this study to other grasslands or conduct time-series experiments to test the generality of these observations.…”