RESILGRAZE - Increasing the resilience of High Nature Value pastoral systems hosting wild and domestic ungulates

Pastoral livestock breeding is a widespread exploitation system in many areas of the world, often in areas of High Nature Value, including nature reserves. In these areas, pastoral practices must seek a balance that ensures the long-term sustainability of the exploitation and the conservation of the ecosystems hosting it.

In strongly seasonal areas, such as Europes temperate and Mediterranean regions, achievingsuch  balance is particularly difficult owing to the perceptual and management constraints imposed by the large, seasonal and inter-annual fluctuations in climatology (e.g., rainfall and temperature) which, in turn, result in large changes in plant productivity. The solution to thisdilemm a is complex, since it involves the use of conservative stocking rates (low enough to prevent overgrazing in dry years) or the
development of flexible systems based on the dynamic adjustment of stocking rates and space use by livestock (and/or wild ungulates) in response to plant-production changes. The development of such strategies and tools is all the more valuable because climate change is expected to result in an amplification of extreme meteorological events thus resulting in an amplification of the processes described above. 

RESILGRAZE will combine a diverse, inter-disciplinary battery of methods to develop management strategies that optimize the balance between pastoral production, wildlife conservation, and ecosystem resilience to climate change focusing on Mediterranean- and temperate-climate ecosystems along a broad latitudinal gradient within Europes Atlantic region. For this purpose, it will: 

(1) Identify the drivers of changes in vegetation production, (wild and domestic) and ungulate food intake, condition and health, productivity and population dynamics. 

(2) Quantify the main drivers of ecosystem resilience to ungulate grazing and climate change, with an emphasis on (i) plant-herbivore dynamics along the spatio-temporal gradient of water availability and soil fertility, and (ii) the cumulative, long-term impact of grazing levels on ecosystem structure and function. 

(3) Co-design and develop models of the relationship between climatology (rainfall and temperature), grazing pressure, plant productivity and ecosystem resilience, and use them to undertake a participative
evaluation of different management scenarios under current and forecasted climate conditions. 

The results will contribute to advance scientific knowledge on the role of large herbivores on Mediterranean and temperate ecosystems, and will address the three challenges faced by the bioeconomy sector: securing viable food p roduction in face of a growing demand, ensuring the sustainable management ofnatural resources and climate action, and achieving a balanced territorial development of the rural areas and their communities.