Evaluation of mountain pastures quality forming the landscape archetype in Western Carpathians

Abstract

The research of pastures influenced by Carpathian sheep milk farming as a typical archetype was conducted in study areas of the mountain even subalpine landscape in the forest zone of the Western Carpathians in the Slovak Republic. We have chosen 28 areas that have been effected by mountain sheep farming since the period of the Wallachian colonization. The research works were under way from 1998 to 2016. The pastures of observation were from 615 to 1 421 meters above sea level (m a.s.l.) in the areas of 1 398 ha in total that was of various exposition and inclination, from flat surface to steep hillsides with 28° slope. The studied pastures ranged from the species‑rich to species‑poor, from Festuca‑Agrostis grasslands through Nardo‑Agrostion tenuis alliance to Nardion. The number of plant species (from 18 to 48, average 33 at 1 m 2 ) shows a rather varied composition of grasslands. There were only two study sites with higher dominance of Festuca rubra (51 % and 64 %) recorded. The quality of grassland depends on the floristic composition (cover in %) and forage value of the particular species. Evaluation of the grassland quality (E GQ ) reached the average value 57.5 in the scale from 0 to 100. Value varied from least valuable grasslands with 40.1 points in two study plots to valuable grasslands with 69.4 points. Relations between selected environmental factors were analysed by means of redundancy analysis (RDA). Among the significant factors of environment, the impact on data set variability was the strongest by altitude (18.1 %), then by total precipitation in the vegetation period (5.6 %) and grassland quality E GQ (5.2 %).