Help us! Submit your favourite grassland photograph to the SUPER-G Photo Competition

Did you photograph any permanent grasslands in Europe this year (or, for that matter, in previous years)?

Whether flowers, butterflies or your pony, whether haymaking or grazing cows, whether amazing landscapes seen on holidays or your favourite evening walk, or even threats to permanent grasslands,  such as summer drought or abandonment – you can submit them all to the SUPER-G photo competition!

This is you chance to win a journey to beautiful Slovenia – and at the same time, help scientists to learn more about the cultural values of European grasslands.

SUPER-G is a EU-funded Horizon 2020 project, bringing together researchers from 14 coutries. Over the course of five years, we are working together with stakeholders – farmers, advisers, policy-makers, and the general public – to find ways to maintain European permanent grasslands and manage them in increasingly sustainable ways.

So, if you have time over the holidays, why not help us and give your favourite grassland images a greater audience?

Red deer – King of the Forest, or Knight of Open Landscapes?

Red deer are far from uncontroversial in Germany – because of the damage they can cause to forests, they are tolerated only within special designated areas. An adapted hunting management, however, can encourage red deer to increasingly forage in open landscapes rather than forests. A previous animal telemetry study already showed the success of such a management within the Military Training Area Grafenwöhr.

Friederike Riesch, Ph.D. student in our group, investigated whether such free-ranging wild red deer can actually contribute to the conservation of open landscapes in such areas. Like many closed or active military training areas, Grafenwöhr contains protected open habitats that rely on regular management. Conservation livestock grazing, however, is not possible, as it requires fencing and regular animal control, both of which are hard to realize in these large areas with active military training and remaining unexploded ordinance. So, could red deer, as an autochtonous wild herbivore, fill the role of ‘conservation manager’?

In the course of a three-year study, Friederike found that the amount of biomass removed by wild red deer was comparable to that eaten by livestock under conservation grazing schemes. Biomass removal in lowland hay meadows was highest in spring, but reached its maximum in winter in heathlands, thus fitting well with the different conservation requirements of these two habitats. Such a clear and positive result was surprising even for us!

Read it all in our article now published in the Journal of Applied Ecology!

GrassCOPS database

Grass cobs: pelletized grass for feeding (photograph above)

GrassCOPS: new online data base for finding research on grassland management from the ‘grey literature’ (photograph below):

Heike Paesel and her student helpers have done a tremendous work entering over 20 years of German grassland research as presented on the annual AGGF meetings into a data base that does not only give an (English) summary, but allows you to search for contributions based on target and response variables as well.

More details can be found here (in German, with English abstract).

And if you should be interested of contributing other ‘grey literature’, e.g. conference abstracts on grassland-management-related topics, contact us!

Shit happens

And what happens then?

Surprisingly little: Given that an equivalent of more than 50 g/m ² of N and 15 g/m² of P are deposited at cattle dung patches, we would have expected significant increases in plant productivity, but did not find any. Even at cattle and sheep urine patches, productivity increases were modest at 15%.

In contrast to the plants, the animals cared: they avoided dung patches (cattle longer than sheep) and showed some preference for urine patches when grazing.

Read more in our  paper just published in Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems (ResearchGate).