Design principles for multi-species productive grasslands
Quantifying effects of diversity beyond richness
- Productive grasslands in temperate regions have relied strongly on low plant diversity with high management intensity and fertiliser inputs. Increasing plant diversity can provide high yields of digestible forage for livestock production with lower environmental impacts, and thus represents a diversity-dependent nature-based solution that can deliver multiple ecosystem functions.
- Sharing lessons from the design of managed, productive grassland communities, we address the following questions: how can we identify combinations of plant species that best deliver a selected function or multiple functions? and; when is community composition more important than species richness?
- We describe approaches that separate plant diversity into its underlying components: species richness, composition and relative abundance. Disentangling these three components facilitates a more nuanced understanding of how diversity can contribute to the design of diversity-dependent nature-based solutions.
Title of publication: Journal of Ecology
Page range: 1-9
Author: John A. Finn
Other authors: Matthias Suter, Rishabh Vishwakarma, Natalie J. Oram, Andreas Lüscher, Caroline Brophy
Organization: Environment Research Centre, Ireland
Year: 2024
Type: Journal article
Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.14314
Content language: English