Grassland Plants
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Increase diversity and abundance
Data collection in progress
Iron Curtain to Green Belt
Bulgaria
Problem: Across the landscape, natural and semi-natural grasslands are being ploughed and converted to arable land, often driven by agricultural subsidies and resulting in unsustainable agricultural practices. Important and rare plant and animal communities associated with these grasslands, including souslik, are therefore under threat.
Action: Areas of arable land and/or degraded pasture will be purchased, protected and restored by the project. Unsustainable arable agricultural practices will be ended and sustainable levels of grazing will be implemented in these areas.
Indicator: The community composition and abundance of plants will be monitored as indicators of the recovery of the grassland habitats in this landscape. Data from this indicator will be combined with the Grassland Birds and Grasshoppers indicators to provide a multispecies biodiversity index of changes in community.
Double Peacock Anemone, a genus of flowering plants in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae. Plants of the genus are commonly called windflowers. Photo: Svetoslav Spasov
Lady orchid (Orchis purpurea). Photo: Svetoslav Spasov
Methods
Because the recovery of grassland ecosystems will be slower than the timeframe of the ELSP project, it will be difficult to detect changes in the plant community associated with grassland restoration during this period. The project will therefore collect data on plant composition, abundance and richness using the same methodology, in three habitat types: arable fields, open grasslands, and grasslands with shrubs and trees. Some areas in each of these habitats will be restored by the project (treatment sites) and others will receive no restoration treatment (control sites). Grassland Plant data will be collected at the same sites as Grassland Birds and Grasshoppers data.
Plant surveys will be carried out before and after grassland restoration will take place, twice per year between April and July. The first survey will be carried out in 2024, and the follow-up survey is planned for 2027. The plots will all be located within 1 km of of a restoration site and within the project area. Plants will be surveyed using two methods. Plant composition, particularly rare species and species of conservation concern, will be surveyed along a 1 km x 2 m transect in each habitat type. The relative abundance and richness of plant species will also be surveyed in ten 2 x 2 m sampling plots in each habitat type.
Comparing the plant communities across each of these three habitat types will allow the project to demonstrate the biodiversity change that can be expected after grassland restoration, and track the restoration sites’ progress as they hopefully approach the target condition.
Results
This page will be updated once the project the baseline data has been collected and analysed.
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