Meadow flowers do not come out of the blue
2010
Huguenin-Elie, O. | Stutz, C. J. | Lüscher, A., Forschungsanstalt Agroscope Reckenholz-Taenikon ART, Zuerich (Switzerland) | Gago, R.
Our high-performance farm animals need tasty, nutritious fodder. This comes from lush meadows, frequently used and given regular applications of fertiliser. Such intensive management, however, is very detrimental to plant diversity. Since the 90s the federal government has been endeavouring to promote meadow flower diversity by supporting the conservation and recreation of extensively cultivated meadows. In those days almost all the grassland on the Swiss Central Plateau was intensively managed, so new species-rich meadows had to be created. The solution was to be no fertilisers and late, less frequent usage, but time has shown that this does not generally reinstate the desired species-rich meadows within 10 to 20 years. Although such so-called extensification has resulted in reduced yield and fodder quality, the displaced meadow flowers rarely re-establish themselves on their own without further assistance. In an experiment conducted by ART Research Station a meadow was divided into plots which were subjected to different fertiliser regimes for 14 years. Not once did the researchers find an increased number of species in the plots which had not been treated with fertiliser.[...] The researchers were easily able to increase meadow flower diversity by seeding existing plant populations with seed mixtures. They also demonstrated the importance of many years of fertiliser-free cultivation to the success of such a measure. These results make it clear that the restoration of plant diversity is very slow and expensive. Scrupulous attention to the conservation of existing species-rich plant populations is therefore essential.
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