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Impact of targeted sheep grazing on herbage and holm oak saplings in a silvopastoral wildfire prevention system in south-eastern Spain

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Abstract

Several wildfire prevention programs in southern Europe are currently using livestock grazing for the maintenance of fuelbreaks. This silvopastoral management is valued for being sustainable and effective in reducing fuel loads, but few studies have analyzed other impacts linked to fuelbreak grazing. This paper reports on an experiment performed within the wildfire prevention program in Andalusia (southern Spain) with the aim of clarifying and quantifying the effect of fuelbreak grazing on herbage biomass, ground cover, herbage species composition, and growth of holm oak saplings. The study site, located in a semiarid Mediterranean environment, was grazed by a shepherded sheep flock from February to June in three consecutive years at a similar stocking rate. Livestock consumed between 33 and 68 % of herbage production in the different years, and the greatest fuel reduction (remaining dry matter of 200 kg ha−1) was registered in Year 2, when rainfall and herbage production was lowest. Ground cover was significantly affected by grazing: on average, the percentage of bare soil increased three-fold, while herbage cover was reduced by a quarter. The botanical composition of herbage varied remarkably between years, but very little between Grazed and Non-Grazed areas within each year. Non-browsed holm oak saplings became progressively larger than browsed ones, differences only reaching clear statistical significance at the end of the three experimental years. At this time, the volume of browsed saplings was 47–56 % smaller than that of non-browsed holm oaks, even though the former had also grown significantly in the course of the experiment.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Carmen Fallot, Domingo Álvarez, Alicia García, Anita Balinga, Juan Cardoso, Fidel Delgado and Elsa Varela for their help with field work. Álvaro Yeste also collaborated in the experiment by grazing his sheep flock on the study area. The Ideas Need Communicating Language Services team improved the use of English in the manuscript. The first author was supported by an I3P postgraduate grant from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), co-funded by the European Social Fund. This study was funded by Egmasa (Regional Government of Andalucía, Spain) through the project Grazed fuelbreaks as a fire-preventive silvicultural tool in Mediterranean forestlands, coordinated by Dr. González-Rebollar.

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  1. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Estación Experimental del Zaidín, C/Profesor Albareda 1, 18008, Granada, Spain

    Jabier Ruiz-Mirazo & Ana Belén Robles

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  1. Jabier Ruiz-Mirazo
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  2. Ana Belén Robles
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Correspondence to Jabier Ruiz-Mirazo.

Appendix: plant catalogue

Appendix: plant catalogue

See Table 3.

Table 3 Catalogue of plant species in the firebreak, grouped by botanical families. Families (in bold) are sorted by their overall family contribution (FC) and, within families, species are sorted by their overall specific contribution (SC)
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Ruiz-Mirazo, J., Robles, A.B. Impact of targeted sheep grazing on herbage and holm oak saplings in a silvopastoral wildfire prevention system in south-eastern Spain. Agroforest Syst 86, 477–491 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-012-9510-z

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