Directorate-General for Environment
Abandoning grassland, as well as a focus on monocultural plantation forests on the habitat, hurts biodiversity and affects its capacity to provide services which enable effective ecosystem functioning, suggests research from Estonia.
Grasslands are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in Europe, and also play a considerable role in providing ecosystem services vital to agriculture and society, such as pollination, the maintenance of soil quality and natural pest control. Their existence largely rests on human activities such as grazing and mowing1, but changes in land use have led to their steep decline over the last century. The largest proportion of loss is due to conversion into intensively managed arable fields, but abandonment, leading to shrub encroachment, as well as afforestation using plantation forests, have also played considerable roles.
Despite recognition of the importance of such grasslands, their destruction is ongoing. Recent years have seen tree planting promoted as a means of climate change mitigation, posing another possible existential threat to these habitats. With 95% of semi-natural grassland lost in Estonia, researchers in the country set out to understand the impact of grassland abandonment and afforestation on the provision of ecosystem services, addressing what they saw as a lack of focus on the consideration of biodiversity in afforestation programmes.
- They analysed a large data set focused on land-use change in Estonian alvars – semi-natural grasslands on calcareous bedrock.
- Thirty-five large historical grassland sites were selected for study, based on them having remaining recovery potential.
- Within the sites, areas were classed, based on their condition as either ‘open’, ‘overgrown’ or ‘afforested’ zones, creating a total of 105 subsites.
- To assess biodiversity in the zones, they calculated the species richness of 10 groups of organisms, ranging from vascular plants and lichens to ground beetles and birds.
- They also looked at how effective the habitat was in providing eight ecosystem services, using different measurement approaches.
Further Information
The findings suggest that afforestation of high diversity grasslands should not be considered as a sustainable climate-change mitigation strategy, due to losses through this approach outweighing gains, say the researchers. Furthermore, the data underlines key conservation principles: the more biodiverse areas are, the more effectively they are able to provide a number of vital functions for sustaining life on earth - a fundamental that applies beyond grasslands, to managing the preservation of all biodiverse habitat.
The contents and views included in Science for Environment Policy are based on independent, peer reviewed research and do not necessarily reflect the position of the European Commission. Please note that this article is a summary of only one study. Other studies may come to other conclusions.