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Plant biomass production on grasslands restored on former arable land
Křivská, Aneta ; Mudrák, Ondřej (advisor) ; Bitomský, Martin (referee)
The White Carpathian meadows are among the species richest plant communities in the world, yet a large area of them has been ploughed in the past. Despite the abandonment of intensive farming and the subsequent effort to restore the original species richness of the former arable land over the last 20 years, there are still differences between the meadows which were previously used for agricultural production and the well-preserved ancient reference meadows. To understand why this is so, it may be helpful to measure the dynamics of plant biomass production over the year and whether it differs between these two types of meadows. The research was conducted in three pairs of White Carpathian meadows on two dates - at the beginning of the growing season in May and right before mowing in June 2023. In all pairs of meadows, occurring in close proximity to each other, one of the meadows was restored after previous ploughing and the other was ancient. At each meadow, I have sampled aboveground biomass in five 40 × 40 cm plots and sorted it into functional groups (graminoids, legumes, and forbs - i.e. non-leguminous dicots) and into dead biomass, dried and weighed. In average, more biomass tended to occur in the restored meadows, but this difference was formed mainly by dead biomass, which was more abundant...
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