Managing natural grasslands in a changing world: grazing ecology insights to accomplish re‐oriented management expectations

摘要

1.There is an increasing debate regarding the quality of pastoral environment.More than the production per se, a series of multifunctional responsibilities have been attributed to the pastoral ecosystems, that they always had, but have only became imperative as the world natural resources became threatened.2.The quality of the use of a pastoral ecosystem can be interpreted through signals emitted by their biotic and abiotic components.For example, plants and animals show patterns of behaviour that permit inferences about nutrient acquisition status or nature of the competition being faced.As a result, the prevailing strategies of response in a given environment indicate the selection forces involved that, in turn, determine particular adaptive attributes of plants and animals as a response to them.3.The objective of this paper is to discuss patterns of behavioural responses of plants and animals based on the most common source of disturbance manipulated by human actions in a pastoral ecosystem, the grazing intensity.4.It is suggested that the recognition and interpretation of plant functional groups and ingestive behaviour of animals should provide the basis for the invention and planning of re‐oriented grazing management strategies to construct pastoral environments in agreement with the new expectations and demands of a changing world.