Is grazing exclusion effective in restoring vegetation in degraded alpine grasslands in Tibet, China?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Ecosystem Science, Plant Science
- Keywords
- Grazing exclusion, Alpine grassland, Grassland degradation, Community characteristics, Biomass, Tibet
- Copyright
- © 2015 Yan et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Is grazing exclusion effective in restoring vegetation in degraded alpine grasslands in Tibet, China? PeerJ PrePrints 3:e931v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.931v1
Abstract
Overgrazing is considered one of the key disturbance factors that results in alpine grassland degradation in Tibet. Grazing exclusion by fencing has been widely used as an approach to restore degraded grassland s in Tibet since 2004. Is the grazing exclusion management strategy effective for the vegetation restoration of degraded alpine grasslands? Three alpine grassland types were selected in Tibet to investigate the effect of grazing exclusion on plant community structure and biomass. Our results showed that species biodiversity indicators, including the Pielou evenness index, the Shannon-Wiener diversity index, and the Simpson dominance index, did not significantly change under grazing exclusion conditions. In contrast, the total vegetation cover, the mean vegetation height of the community, and the aboveground biomass were significantly higher in the grazing exclusion grasslands than in the free grazed grasslands. These results indicated that grazing exclusion is an effective measure for maintaining community stability and improving aboveground vegetation growth in alpine grasslands. However, the statistical analysis showed that the alpine grassland type plays a more important role than grazing exclusion in which influence on vegetation in alpine grasslands because the alpine grassland type had a significant effect on vegetation indicators but grazing exclusion not. In addition, because the results of the present study come from short term (5-7 years) grazing exclusion, it is still uncertain whether these improvements will be continuable if grazing exclusion is continuously implemented. Therefore, the assessments of the ecological effects of the grazing exclusion management strategy on degraded alpine grasslands in Tibet are still need long term continued research.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Raw data of plant community characteristics and biomass
Values of plant community characteristics and biomass in three alpine grassland types at nine sampling sites under free grazing and grazing exclusion conditions.