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Student seminar: The eradication of small rodents, plateau zokors affect little on plant community in alpine meadow on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, Jiahuan Niu, 2024-05-09
03 May 2024, 1:56 PM
Speaker: Jiahuan Niu
Date: 2024-05-09
Time: 13:30-14:00
Room: ES354
Online link:
https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/v169BGHYrPM6
Meeting ID: 668-4466-7997
Title: The eradication of small rodents, plateau zokors affect little on plant community in alpine meadow on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau
Abstract:
Herbivores can structure plant communities by affecting species coexistence, dominant species, and nutrients in the environment. Rodents, as common herbivores usually reproduce fast, and have a high population density. Rodents are regarded as one of the causes of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) alpine meadow degradation because where they are distributed in high density may lead to soil disturbances. Many studies focus on observing the specific effect of rodents’ activity on plant community composition and biomass on a plot scale, which makes it hard to attribute the effects to rodents. Local stakeholders and the grassland agency care about rodents’ effect on productivity and pasture quality in the whole pasture, so this study wants to contribute to how rodents affect the plant community by comparing rodent removal and control fields in QTP. Plateau zokor (Eospalax baileyi) is distributed in the wetter part of the QTP, where yak (Bos grunniens) and Tibetan sheep (Ovis aries) are the dominant livestock. Here we investigated the zokors grazing impacts on plant community composition and productivity. In 2021, we followed local government zokor eradication management and selected 17 fields, each field has one-time eradication in the zokor removal fields and no eradication in the control fields, both occupy 0.25 hm. During three years of this research, results showed that (1) zokor eradication has no effect on zokor disturbance intensity, and (2) zokor eradication has no effect on graminoid, forbs, poisonous species, legumes, and total biomass. This work demonstrates there is no impact of zokor eradication on plant community productivity and zokor eradication efforts should be reevaluated.