Work

Reintroducing grazing reshapes grassland communities: Stronger responses in wet than dry habitats

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Temperate grasslands in Europe are increasingly threatened by management abandonment, which reduces habitat heterogeneity and promotes competitive exclusion by fast-growing dominant species. Although extensive year-round grazing is widely used as a restoration tool, its short-term ecological responses across moisture gradients remain poorly understood. We used a BACI (Before–After–Control–Impact) design to investigate vegetation dynamics during the first three years following grazing introduction. Across 43 paired plots spanning a moisture gradient at 11 degraded grassland localities in the Czech Republic (i.e., rewilding reserves at the national level), we quantified shifts in species richness, species cover, and community-weighted means of selected plant traits, such as clonality index, specific leaf area (SLA), seed mass, canopy height, and flowering duration. We found that reintroducing grazing triggered a significant competitive release effect, with grazed plots gaining on average 4.8 species (17%) over three years, while ungrazed controls remained stable. This increase was primarily driven by suppression of dominant, often invasive alien and ruderal species, facilitating the recruitment of subordinate native species, with stronger responses in wet than dry habitats. However, these taxonomic changes have not yet been translated into higher Shannon diversity, indicating that newly recruited species remain at low abundance and have not substantially altered community evenness. Our findings demonstrate that grazing can redirect successional trajectories, with outcomes strongly mediated by environmental context, such as a moisture gradient.

Source: Global Ecology and Conservation

DOI: 10.1016/j.gecco.2026.e04473