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Symposium at International Association of Landscape Ecology: Nairobi July 10-14 2023 | Li Li's Profile

Symposium: How do we incorporate vegetation, grazing and landscape heterogeneity to gain a better understanding of both grassland degradation and restoration processes

Organizer: Li Li, Johannes Knops

Abstract:

Grasslands support the livelihoods of over 1 billion people. Grasslands are frequently rich in biodiversity, are important for carbon storage and provide irreplaceable cultural values to local people. However, nearly 50% of the global grasslands are degraded due to overgrazing, soil erosion, pollution, shrub encroachment, biological invasions, etc. Furthermore, climate change is putting novel pressures on grassland ecosystems. Entering the UN "Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030", the importance and multi-functionality of grassland has gained worldwide recognition: Grassland restoration programs have been launched or are planned at the regional or national levels. However, ecological processes driving the degradation and successful restoration are diverse and need to be studied and understood within a landscape context, while considering its social and environmental heterogeneity. 

In this interdisciplinary symposium we examine multiple ecological and social–ecological processes underlying the degradation and restoration of grasslands. Landscape level topography, vegetation and grazing intensity causes local disturbance heterogeneity which inducing spatial degradation patterns. We need to examine degradation among these scales because processes differ in the scale at which they operate. We argue that grassland degradation can only be understood by explicitly examining these scale dependent processes and their interactions. In contrast to grassland degradation, current restoration efforts largely ignore spatial landscape heterogeneity.  We raise the question: can we ignore spatial landscape level heterogeneity in grassland restoration? Or how can we incorporate landscape level topography, vegetation, and grazing heterogeneity in creating successful restoration projects. Learning from a variety of landscape-level degradation and restoration studies we will synthesize our current knowledge of the importance of landscape heterogeneity.