English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

The functioning of European grassland ecosystems: potential benefits of biodiversity to agriculture

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons62537

Scherer-Lorenzen,  M.
Department Biogeochemical Processes, Prof. E.-D. Schulze, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Minns, A., Finn, J., Hector, A., Caldeira, M., Joshi, J., Palmborg, C., et al. (2001). The functioning of European grassland ecosystems: potential benefits of biodiversity to agriculture. Outlook on Agriculture, 30(3), 179-185.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000E-CE16-8
Abstract
About half the farmland of Europe is grassland pasture or hay meadow, and much is impoverished in plant species due to the addition of fertilizers and pesticides, agricultural re-sowing, habitat fragmentation, land abandonment and changes in grazing and mowing regimes. Given this widespread reduction, it is important to understand the effect that loss of biodiversity is having upon our wider environment. Here the authors summarize the main results from the BIODEPTH project, the first multinational, large-scale experiment to examine directly the relationship between plant diversity and the processes that determine the functioning of ecosystems. The results suggest that preserving and restoring grassland diversity may be beneficial to maintaining desirable levels of several ecosystem processes, and may therefore have applications in land management and agriculture.