Grassland provides many services for humans, animals and nature, such as feed production, carbon storage and recreation. Researchers spent two years investigating permanent grassland, its utilization, soils and plant communities in order to quantify the resulting ecosystem services.
Grassland performs best when different types of use such as meadows, pastures and unfertilized extensive grassland exist together in a mosaic landscape.
Grassland is an important carbon store and a haven for biodiversity. It protects against erosion and provides cultural services such as an attractive landscape with grazing animals that delights hikers and tourists. These are just a few examples of the many different benefits or functions that researchers attribute to grassland.
"This trade-off between feed production and cultural or regulating services is well known. However, we were able to clearly show that extensive grassland farming produces not only biodiversity benefits but also many societally relevant ecosystem services," Klaus says.The researchers also found a pronounced effect on ecosystem services when grassland was used as pasture or meadow; in other words, depending on whether the area was predominantly grazed or mowed.
If a meadow is used mainly to produce feed, biodiversity and other important services suffer. In extensive unfertilised meadows, meanwhile, farmers must reckon with considerable production losses."If we want to sustain and facilitate the provision of all ecosystem services, we need a combination of different grassland types at the farm and landscape level," Klaus says.
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