Livestock grazing can be used as a key management tool for maintaining healthy ecosystems. However, the effectiveness of using grazing to modify habitat for species of conservation concern depends on how the grazing regime is implemented. Timing of grazing is one grazing regime component that is less understood than grazing intensity and grazer identity, but is predicted to have important impli...

Conservative land-use over the past few decades has converted the Montseny Biosphere Reserve (Spain) from the original open, patchy landscape to almost continuous woodland. Small ruminant grazing is virtually the only major remaining utilisation activity yet little is known about its role in the changing vegetation of the Reserve. This study was undertaken to determine the effects of current gr...

Grazing pastures to low post-grazing sward heights (PGSH) is a strategy to maximise the quantity of grazed grass in the diet of dairy cows within temperate grass-based systems. Within Irish spring-calving systems, it was hypothesised that grazing swards to very low PGSH would increase herbage availability during early lactation but would reduce dairy cow performance, the effect of which would p...

Accelerated erosion of streambanks in grazed riparian pastures is of concern to land managers. We tested the hypothesis that providing cattle free-choice off-stream water and trace mineralized salt would lessen negative impacts of grazing on cover and stability of streambanks compared to pastures lacking these amenities, and may therefore reduce the potential of accelerated erosion. The study w...

investigation of the grazing behavior of grazing animals on the rangeland is one of the basic necessities of grazing management in different climatic regions. the current study with the aim of exploring the grazing behavior of makuyi sheep breed was conducted in the mountainous rangelands of kelid daghi of jolfa as representative rangelands for makuyi sheep breed dispersion in east azerbayjan p...

Despite our growing knowledge on plants' functional responses to grazing, there is no consensus if an optimum level of functional aggregation exists for detecting grazing effects in drylands. With a comparative approach we searched for plant functional types (PFTs) with a consistent response to grazing across two areas differing in climatic aridity, situated in South Africa's grassland and sava...

Circulating microRNAs (c-miRNAs) are associated with physiological adaptation to acute and chronic aerobic exercise in humans. To investigate the potential effect of grazing movement on miRNA circulation in cattle, here we profiled miRNA expression in centrifugally prepared exosomes from the plasma of both grazing and housed Japanese Shorthorn cattle. Microarray analysis of the c-miRNAs resulte...

In arid and semi-arid rangelands, grazing as one of the natural or human induced processes has direct and indirect effects on structure and dynamics of plant community and ecosystems. A study was done to analyze the effects of grazing on plant species diversity and Plant Functional Types‘ (PFTs) diversity of arid and semi-arid rangelands. We analyzed plant richness and diversity data from 75 sa...

To investigate the effect of restricted grazing time on behavior of Tan sheep on desert steppe, forty 4-months old male Tan sheep with an original body weight (BW) of 15.62±0.33 kg were randomly allocated to 4 grazing groups which corresponded to 4 different restricted grazing time treatments of 2 h/d (G2), 4 h/d (G4), 8 h/d (G8) and 12 h/d (G12) access to pasture. The restricted grazing times ...

Periphyton grazing by the marine isopod Idothea chelipes was studied by exposing periphyton grown on glass slides to a gradient of grazer densities. An analysis of the algal growth rates and their relationships to grazer density revealed two groups of algae. The unicellular diatoms Licmophora ehrenbergii, Fragilaria tabulata, Navicula spp., Cocconeis costata, and the green alga Ulothrix implexa...