Managing the Environmental Services from Grasslands
The Governments of China and Mongolia provide considerable support for their grasslands and acknowledge the need to improve the environmental services provided by those grasslands.There are many provisioning,regulating,cultural and supporting environmental services from grasslands.The problem is the impossibility of optimising the management of all those services individually,at the same time.Herders are the frontline land managers on the grasslands.They need environmental services defined in a way they understand,that have relevance to their livelihoods and that they can readily manage.In this paper,we define a core subset of environmental services that can fulfil these requirements and show how these services are linked,which then leads to a primary focus for management on the herbage mass of the grassland.Increasing the herbage mass on grasslands will increase total plant growth,animal production per head,plant diversity,nutrient cycling,soil carbon storage,clean water delivery and reduced soil erosion.Benefits would also flow to improving other environmental services.Reduced stocking rates will increase the grassland herbage mass in many regions.Farm demonstrations across China have shown that reduced stocking rates often increases herder household incomes and is therefore a viable policy option to improve environmental services.
grassland environmental services herder management focus herbage mass
David Kemp Colin Brown Jane Addison Karl Behrendt Li Ping Han Guodong Zhao Mengli Li Zhiguo Wang Zhongwu Udval Gombosuren Wu Jianping Gong Xuyin
Charles Sturt University,Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation,Orange NSW Australia University of Queensland James Cook University Charles Sturt University,Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation,Orange NSW Australia;Harper Adams Institute of Grassland Research Inner Mongolia Agricultural University Research Institute Animal Husbandry,Mongolian University of Life Sciences Gansu Academy of Agricultural Sciences
国际会议
呼和浩特
英文
8-18
2019-12-06（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）