Session

Grasslands represent species-rich plant communities in Europe and their loss is one of the primary causes of terrestrial biodiversity depletion in the Mediterranean Basin. In Italy the abandonment of agro-pastoral activities has an important role in this process, leading to the wood encroachment and loss of grasslands cover. Furthermore, one hypothesis is that grazing makes the system climate-resilient by diversifying the ecological niches. The project CAROLINA aims to explore the potentiality of the grassland’s extensive management under different climate conditions in terms of biodiversity conservation and C sequestration and to examine changes in ecosystem resilience to climate change with land-use variation. In this project 3 sites are object of both remote sensing studies on ecosystem scale and taxonomic and functional biodiversity analyses. They are located in different climatic zones of Italy: alpine pastures with moist cool climate (Pieve Tesino), Mountain-Mediterranean pastures (San Rossore) and Mediterranean pastures with warm and dry climate (San Venanzo). A chronosequence approach is used to evaluate the impact of grazing and abandonment, considering areas abandoned in different time frames. Portions of grasslands in each site are excluded from grazing through the installation of fences to evaluate short-term changes while small portions of grazed areas are object of climate manipulation with structures that lead to a reduction of precipitation, to simulate the future climate trends expected for Italy, different for each site, considering local climate characteristics. About vegetation, the focus is on the connections between functional and taxonomic diversity and physiological characteristics, indicative of possible long-term changes in the community. The niches diversification grade and climate adaptability along the chronosequence is assessed by plant communities' functional and taxonomic diversity and remote sensing is applied to link changes in plant and soil diversity with the multispectral diversity. The surveys in the year 2024 are a zero-point allowing to assess the diversity and functioning of the grasslands before the start of the manipulations that will simulate the removal of grazing and the decrease in water availability.