Structure and Functioning of Seminatural Meadows

373 Pages·1993·5.649 MB·English

by  MILENA RYCHNOVSKÁ (Eds.)

DEVELOPMENTS IN AGRICULTURAL
AND MANAGED-FOREST ECOLOGY 27
structure
a
and functioning
of seminatural
meadows
edited by
MILENA RYCHNOVSKA
Department of Ecology, Faculty of Sciences,
Palacky University, Olomouc, Czechoslovakia
ELSEVIER
Amsterdam-London-New York-Tokyo 1993
Reviewers:
RNDr. Jan Kvet, CSc.
Prof. Miroslav Penka, DrSc.
Published in co-edition with Academia
Publishing House of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences
Prague, Czechoslovakia
exclusive sales rights
in the East European Countries, China, Cuba, Mongolia,
Northern Korea, C.I.S., and Vietnam
Academia, Publishing House of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences,
Prague, Czechoslovakia
in all remaining areas
Elsevier Science Publishers
Sara Burgerhartstraat 25,
P.O. Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Structure and functioning of seminatural meadows/edited by Milena Rychnovska; with contribu
tions by Emilie Balatova-Tulackova... [et al.].
p. cm. - (Developments in agricultural and managed-forest ecology; 27)
Translated from a Czech manuscript.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-444-98669-3
1. Meadows. 2. Meadow ecology. 3. Grassland ecology. 4. Meadows-Central Europe.
5. Meadow ecology-Central Europe. 6. Grassland ecology-Central Europe. I. Rychnovska, Mile
na. II. Balatova-Tulackova, Emilie. III. Series.
QK938.M4S87 1993
574.5 2643-do20 92-11732
CIP
ISBN 0-444-98669-3 (Elsevier)
ISBN 80-200-0353-3 (Academia Prague)
© Milena Rychnovska et al. 1993
Translation © Jin Ulehla 1993
Illustration © Josef Rysavy 1993
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
transmitted in any form by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or other
wise, without the previous consent in writing from the copyright owner.
Printed in Czechoslovakia
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Foreword
Grasslands are an integral part of the European cultural landscape, irrespective
of the degree of its agricultural exploitation. Grassland represents the only crop
with well developed homeostatic mechanisms and it is stable even in the absence
of inputs of additional energy. Both economically and ecologically, it is the best
transformer of solar energy to the proteins required by domestic animals,
without harming the landscape and disturbing the soil. These basic facts seem
to have vanished from the cognizance of farmers and land using people in
general. This is why so many landscapes have been brought to a critically
unstable condition by intensive agricultural production.
Grass stands are the only types of vegetation even in a destabilized landscape
which have at least a seminatural character. They can be easily renovated, are
able to regain their full functional and structural diversity and can stabilize the
soil surface and thus improve soil quality in a short time.
Turf should cover one third of the agricultural land of a well balanced and well
functioning highland landscape. This proportion may equally well consist of
permanent grasslands as well as temporary ones forming the constituents of
crop rotations. The revival of this practice will be unavoidable, since grassland
belts and areas together with woods and wetlands form the frame for the
ecological stability of the cultural landscape.
It is necessary to take into account further impairment of the atmosphere, as
well as the occurrence of unexpected calamities. Only the grassland biome can
be expected to restore quickly enough the trophic chain leading from plants,
through animals, to man. However, the importance of grasslands increases
irrespectively of the direct biomass production. This is due to their sanitary
ability to regenerate agricultural soils degraded by ploughing, heavy machinery
and a surplus of agrochemicals. They protect barren forest soil deprived of
tree stands destroyed by air pollutants, they function as filtration barriers by
cleaning up the surface and subsurface run-off, they restore the sanitary con-
13
dition of domestic animals and the hygienic quality of their milk and meat.
It is rather paradoxical that grasslands are so little exploited on the global
scale. Only about 3 % of their potential production is used on average
worldwide, and even less in some of the developing countries. Here is the reserve
of food for mankind in the 21st century. However, it is a prerequisite to know
how these grassland ecosystems function and what the factors limiting their
production are, in order to control their yield formation and rational exploita
tion.
The team of authors participating in the field project Number 91 of the MAB
(Man and the Biosphere) programme during 1972-1985 attempted to charac
terize in the present book the functioning of grasslands, using the example of a
mesophytic meadow situated in the spring area of the submontane region of
Central Europe. Nevertheless, the information obtained and principles disclosed
can be applied wherever the multifunctional role of grasslands in the landscape
is considered.
Slavomil Hejny
14
1 INTRODUCTION
The landscape of central Europe lies in the temperate forest zone and it has been
inhabited since the Paleolithic and distinctly altered since the Neolithic by man.
In particular, large areas of lowlands and uplands were deforested and gradually
changed to pastures, meadows and arable land to provide for the increasing food
requirements and the material production demanded by the human population.
Up to the 18th century the formation of a cultural landscape was a slow process
controlled both by the experience of hundreds of years and the restricted
technical methods which conformed to the prevailing ecological conditions.
However, the increasing demands of industry, sugar production and the disco
very of mineral fertilizers were accompanied in the 19th century by the first
symptoms of imbalance in the landscape: forest monocultures with outbreaks of
pests and fallen trees, soil erosion and soil fatigue resulting from an inappro
priate application of mineral fertilizers and from oversimplified crop rotations.
The fast development of agricultural machinery, agrochemistry and efficient and
demanding cultivars of crops have led in the 20th century (particularly in its
second half) to the industrialization of agriculture, the minimization of human
work, concentration and specialization, and an overwhelmingly technical
approach to agricultural production.
The step by step disturbance of the ecological stability of the landscape began
to show up as excessive water and wind erosion, the disruption of nutrient cycles,
the undesirable export of nutrients from ecosystems, water eutrophication, and
particularly the diminishing diversity of species in all biotic structures. This
process has gained speed during the last decade.
The increasing water eutrophication and increased water run-off from the
region of the Central European water divide, where the tributaries of either the
Elbe or the Danube rise, is due to intensive agriculture. Agricultural land
extends over 60 % of the area. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion had
previously been occupied by meadows and pastures which protected slopes from
Introduction 15
erosion, formed filtration belts to catch soil washed from fields, and utilized this
filtration effect to enhance the primary production from flood plains. However,
the meadows are being drained and ploughed on a large scale here, which is
combined with the destabilization effects mentioned above.
The importance of meadows and pastures for landscape ecology was
previously appreciated only symptomatically and not in its entirety but rather
according to specific aspects, (for example, their role in improving soil fertility
in crop rotations or in preventing erosion was appreciated). However, it was
necessary to understand and quantify the functioning of grassland ecosystems,
their structures and the processes they support. This was to provide for their
rational use as factors in the stabilization of the landscape, the enrichment of
species diversity of both plants and animals, the restoration of soil fertility, the
restriction of mineral fertilizers and biocides applied, the closing of natural
landscape cycles, particularly of nitrogen, and, the minimization of additional
energy together with a persistently high primary production. Production and
decomposition processes have been studied, to make possible the calculation of
the cycling of water and the main biogenic elements. The economical aspect, i.e.
the yield formation as related to the energy input, could not be neglected.
Nevertheless, factors other than the production were considered equally impor
tant, as for example the diversity of species, the biological soil activity, the
growth and functioning of the inadequately appreciated underground plant
organs, and the aesthetic and recreational function of grasslands in a landscape.
The ecological importance of grasslands in an intensively exploited landscape,
with numerous springs, was the subject of the MAB field Project No. 91:
Function of Grasslands in a Spring Region - the Kamenicky Project, under the
co-ordination of the Botanical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Scien
ces. The operational phase of this programme was undertaken in the Zdarske
Vrchy region of the Bohemian-Moravian Uplands during 1974-1985 (Figure 1-1).
The landscape here has a polyfunctional character, being intensively exploited
for agriculture, providing a supply of drinking water, and serving as an example
of a balanced cultural region with many natural relicts. It has therefore been
declared a Landscape Reserve, registered by the IUCN*). It is also of consider
able recreational importance with respect to the nearby urban agglomerations.
The "Landscape Reserve" is a conservation category under the Czechoslova-
kian nature conservation laws which are applied to territories which provide
good examples of successful landscape management. A Landscape Reserve is
usually a mosaic of small patches of natural and larger areas of either semina-
tural or managed ecosystems. The most valuable parts within a Landscape
Reserve usually acquire a higher conservation status of "Nature Reserves" or
*) International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
16 Introduction
"Protected Natural Monuments". The Zdarske Vrchy Landscape Reserve has
an area of 715 km 2 (See Figure 1-1).
The participants in the Kamenicky Project were research teams of the
Ecological Department of the Botanical Institute of the CSAS (Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences) in Brno**) and of the Department of Pastures and
Fodder Production of the Agricultural University in Brno***). Further partici
pants were specialists of the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the CSAS in
Brno, of the Entomological Institute of the CSAS in Prague, of the agricultural
universities in Brno and Prague and of some other institutes as is evident from
the list of authors and the references. The idea of the project was to compare
three subsystems: a) a natural, unexploited grassland ecosystem (N), b) its cut
and fertilized variants (NF), and c) the subsystem resulting from breaking the
turf and renovating the original grass stand (RF) as described in detail in
Chapter 4.
0 200 km
1—1—1—1—1 £eskomoravska vrchovina
idarske vrchy
Figure 1-1 Czechoslovakia and the Zdarske Vrchy Hills
**) Authors of Chapters 1 to 4, 6 to 8, 11, 12, 14 to 18, 20.
***) Authors of Chapters 10 and 19.
Introduction 17
The book is planned to give first the phytocoenological and synecological
characteristics of grasslands in the wider region of the Zdarske Vrchy Hills,
where fragments of natural grassland vegetation, some surprisingly rich, are
characterized, including the species composition. The descriptions in many cases
do no more than document the rich diversity of the landscape in the recent past;
many of these biotopes, however, could still be restored with their original
vegetation. None the less, the major part of the book deals with the analysis and
synthesis of facts about both the natural and the experimentally exploited model
ecosystems in the vicinity of Kamenicky village. This part includes chapters on
abiotic factors, the structures and functions of the primary producers, consu
mers and decomposers; and it is supplemented by research concerned with
calculations on carbon and nitrogen cycles within the whole ecosystem. Some of
the results were verified in the biotopes commonly farmed in the wider region.
The concluding parts of the book extrapolate to the landscape the information
amassed from the model ecosystem. The agricultural exploitation of meadows
and pastures and their fertility are discussed here, the final word being given to
the role and importance of grasslands in the landscape.
The findings about the functions of grassland ecosystems can be applied in
general to similar grassland types of the highland regions of Europe. There is no
doubt that some of the principles recognized hold true for physiognomically
similar ecosystems with similar abiotic conditions over the whole world. The
results of this case study may therefore be expected to contribute to the universal
treasury of the MAB programme results which are orientated towards the
worldwide UNESCO programme (Project 3): Impact of human activities and
land use practices on grazing lands: savanna, grassland (from temperate to arid
areas), tundra. They may also serve as guidelines for landscape management
practices in regions where water resources are of equally importance to agricul
tural production, and where the protection of nature is also accentuated.
Finally, it is the pleasant duty of the editor and the authors to remember the
stimulating spirit of the International Biological Programme of the 1960s, which
introduced the ecosystem approach into landscape ecology, made possible
a lively international exchange of ideas, and taught us the value of integrated
teamwork on a common ecological project. We are further indebted to the
Botanical Institute of the CSAS for the creative atmosphere and patronage given
to our research work from its beginnings. The editor's thanks also go to
Dr. Eudovit Weismann and to the Institute of Landscape Ecology of the SAS
(Slovak Academy of Sciences), which made possible the final editorial work.
Thanks are also due to Dr. Jan Kvet for his valuable recommendations and
critical comments, and to Dr. Jin Ulehla for many formal as well as factual
improvements made during his English translation.
18 Introduction