Role of grazing cattle on seed dispersal of plants in a hill pasture 4 . effects of dung patch on environmental condition in dung and seedling establishment

摘要

Our previous study indicated that most seedlings of herbaceous plants germinated from dung pats died in both sunny (SUN) and shading (SHA) places, due to high temperature in SUN and deficiency of solar radiation in SHA, in a 10‐ week periods from early summer to early autumn (Ogura et al., 2008).This suggests that more moderate shading created by tall grasses surrounding a dung patch provides proper environmental condition for seedling establishment.In this study, a field experiment was conducted to examine if a dung patch provided proper environmental condition for seed germination and seedling survival.