Definición de un protocolo de monitorización de la vegetación en la recuperación de hábitats pascícolas tras desbroce mecánico

Resumen

Many shrubby and herbaceous pastoral mountain habitats are considered part of community interest zones included in the Natura 2000 Network. Their conservation goes through adequate grazing stocking rate, calendar, type of animals and human interventions. However, extensive grazing in mountain pastures is actually associated with an unbalanced spatio-temporal distribution of livestock. This is due to a gradual abandonment of the activity as well as the increase of cattle, related to the underutilization and scrubland increase in some areas. In this scenario, shrub clearing is the most widespread action, but in most areas, the evolution of their conservation status is unknown. With the objective of pastoral habitats conservation, in the LIFE-OREKAMENDIAN project (LIFE15 NAT / ES / 000805) it was proposed to establish a plant structure monitoring protocol and transfer it to technicians and livestock farmers. After the comparison of two different protocols (vegetation cover by visual estimation versus contact) and the assesment of the number of squares and contacts, the results in the ZEC Aizkorri-Aratz point to a protocol with 200 contacts/sample unit and the monitoring of functional groups: grasses and graminoids, legumes, other dicots, shrub species, as well as bare soil and necromass. The establishment of permanent plots and the interannual monitoring will allow to evaluate the evolution of the vegetal structure to be of help in decision making process for conservation management for pasture habitats present in mountain areas.