Meadow
Meadows can occur naturally under favourable conditions, but are often artificially created from cleared shrub or woodland for the production of hay, fodder, or livestock.
[1] Meadow habitats, as a group, are characterized as "semi-natural grasslands", meaning that they are largely composed of species native to the region, with only limited human intervention.
They are ecologically important as they provide areas for animal courtship displays, nesting, food gathering, pollinating insects, and sometimes sheltering, if the vegetation is high enough.
Intensified agricultural practices (too frequent mowing, use of mineral fertilizers, manure and insecticides), may lead to declines in the abundance of organisms and species diversity.
[2] There are multiple types of meadows, including agricultural, transitional, and perpetual – each playing a unique and important part of the ecosystem.
In agriculture, a meadow is grassland which is not regularly grazed by domestic livestock, but rather allowed to grow unchecked in order to produce hay.
Agricultural meadows are typically lowland or upland fields upon which hay or pasture grasses grow from self-sown or hand-sown seed.
Ecologist Professor John Rodwell states that over the past century, England and Wales have lost about 97% of their hay meadows.
[1] A transitional meadow occurs when a field, pasture, farmland, or other cleared land is no longer cut or grazed and starts to display luxuriant growth, extending to the flowering and self-seeding of its grass and wildflower species.
[8] The condition is however only temporary, because the grasses eventually become shaded out when scrub and woody plants become well-established, being the forerunners of the return to a fully wooded state.
[8] In North America prior to European colonization, Algonquians, Iroquois and other Native Americans peoples regularly cleared areas of forest to create transitional meadows where deer and game could find food and be hunted.
For example, some of today's meadows originated thousands of years ago, due to regular burnings by Native Americans.
[11] Types of perpetual meadows may include: Recently, urban areas have been thought of as potential biodiversity conservation sites.
Urban lawns require intensive management that puts the life there at risk of losing their habitat, especially due to the mowing frequency.
The majority of the people that live in the urban regions of any country usually get their plant knowledge from visiting parks and or public green infrastructure.
Factors that managers of urban spaces list as important to regard are: Artificially or culturally conceived meadows emerge from and continually require human intervention to persist and flourish.
This reduces or removes their natural influence on the surrounding ecology and results in meadows only being created or maintained by human intervention.
However, meadows seem to have been sustained historically by naturally occurring large grazers, which kept plant growth in checked and maintained the cleared space.
The soil's organic material had faded away and was affected due to the chemicals from the artificial melting water from the snow and skiing machinery.
[26] There is a variety of hydrological regimes for meadows, ranging from dry to humid, each yielding different plant communities adapted to the respective provider of water.
Meadows that are either dry or wet appear to be rather resilient to change, as a moderate increase or decrease in precipitation does not radically alter their character.
[27] By harming specialised plants and promoting the prevalence of more generalist species, more unstable precipitation patterns could also reduce ecological biodiversity.
As ecological communities are often highly adapted to local circumstances which can not be reproduced at higher elevations, Debinski et al. describe the short-term changes observed on meadows "as a shift in the mosaic of the landscape composition".
Timing and duration of flowering is one of the phenological reassembly driven by many different factors like snow melt, temperature and soil moisture to mention a few.
It is crucial to keep in mind that these plants are usually sharing the space and constantly interacting with bryophytes, lichens, arthropods, animals and many other organisms.
In the instance of seagrass meadows, enhanced production of other greenhouse gases (CH4 and N2O) does occur but the estimated overall effect results in an offset of the total emission.
[37] As exemplified by the alpine wetland meadow on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, there is the potential of being a moderate source of CO2 and a carbon sink, due to high soil organic content and low decomposition.
Audubon's preliminary studies point to the potential of storing a substantially increased amount of soil carbon compared to degraded meadows while boosting the local biodiversity.
