Many arid grasslands around the world are affected by woody plant encroachment and by the replacement of a relatively continuous grass cover with shrub patches bordered by bare soil. This shift in plant community composition is often abrupt in space and ti ...
Aim To contribute to the intense debate surrounding the relative influence of climate and humans on Mediterranean-region land cover over the past 6000 years, we assess the Holocene biogeography and vegetation history of southern Europe by means of an exten ...
Cattle activity greatly influences plant species composition and biomass production of grassland ecosystems. Dung deposition by cattle together with grazing and trampling can be considered as one of the important factors driving vegetation dynamics in past ...
Browsing by livestock has been identified as an important factor preventing tree regeneration in wooded pastures. Two field experiments were performed to investigate the effects of cattle browsing on tree sapling growth in a mountainwooded pasture. Two siz ...
Cattle influences gap dynamics in pastures in two ways: (1) by creating gaps and (2) by affecting the colonization process. This effect of cattle activity on gap revegetation can be subdivided in three main factors: herbage removal, trampling and dung and ...
Management-oriented models of cattle habitat use often treat grazing pressure as a single variable summarizing all cattle activities. This paper addresses the following questions: How does the spatial pattern of cattle effects vary between cattle activitie ...
Wood-pastures are semi-natural, highly biodiverse systems maintained by traditional extensive agriculture. They are used for grazing and timber. The shifting mosaics of grassland, shrub thickets and woodland patches in these systems are driven by large her ...
