The cascading impacts of livestock grazing in upland ecosystems : a 10-year experiment

By D. Evans, Nacho Villar, N. Littlewood, R. Pakeman, S. Evans, Peter Dennis, J. Skartveit, Steve Redpath. 2015

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Livestock grazing is a major driver of land-use change, causing significant biodiversity loss globally. Although the short-term effects of livestock grazing on individual species are well studied, a mechanistic understanding of the long-term, cascading impacts is lacking. We manipulated livestock densities using a unique, replicated upland experiment over a 10-year period and found significant effects of grazing treatment on plant and arthropod biomass; the number of Anthus pratensis breeding bird territories; the amplitude of Microtus agrestis population cycles and the activity of a top predator, Vulpes vulpes. Lower plant biomass as a result of higher stocking densities led to cascades across trophic levels, with fewer arthropods and small mammals, the latter affecting predator activity. Breeding bird territories were a function of arthropod abundance and vegetation structure heterogeneity. Our results provide a novel food-web analysis in a grazing experiment to provide a mechanistic understanding of ho...

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/715fefaf60e59db631b12abd794eaab507f31c28