Traditional agriculture creates necessary biodiversity
Maramureș and Bukovina belong to remote areas of the Eastern Carpathians, which have not yet been fully touched by agricultural modernization and where the current way of life resembles that of our ancestors. Here, hay is valued like gold, and people have developed a strong bond with the soil. Meadows and pastures in these regions are rich in biodiversity, and many belong to High Nature Value grasslands.
Today, the prestigious People and Nature magazine published the research results of the SAS botanists.
"Our research was focused on the plant diversity and associated farming practices of meadows and pastures in the Maramureș and Bukovina regions on the border between Romania and Ukraine. We investigated how these practices developed over time and how historical and social factors shaped the current diversity of vascular plants and mosses," said Monika Janišová from Plant Science and Biodiversity Centre SAS, Institute of Botany.
The botanists found that traditional agricultural practices still prevail in most investigated municipalities. The current vegetation diversity is more a result of the chosen farming method, such as the frequency of mowing and the intensity of grazing, than a consequence of different habitat factors, such as the terrain inclination or the soil properties. Social changes, including declining populations, numbers of farm animals and changes in agricultural policy, are leading to modification of agricultural practices.
"One of the most significant changes is the reduced seasonal migration of farm animals from the village to summer mountain pastures, the so-called transhumance. As a result, there are inevitably changes in the timing of mowing and grazing, which significantly affects plant species populations. We also found that mineral fertilizers used in Ukrainian villages during the Soviet era left measurable traces in the composition types of the vegetation of meadows and pastures. We propose simple strategies to maintain a high diversity of local meadow and pasture vegetation, as a landscape diversity that is exceptionally high on a pan-European scale," added the botanist.
The research was supported by several grant schemes: the National Geographic Society supported the research with an NGS-288R-18 grant, the Slovak Research and Development Agency with an APVV-21-0226 grant and the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic and the Slovak Academy of Sciences with a VEGA 02/0065/23 grant. The research was also supported by the University of Graz in Austria and project no. 09I03-03-V01-00018 financed from the Recovery Plan within the EU NextGenerationEU call.
The research article by Monika Janišová and co-authors was published on October 21 in People and Nature magazine:
anišová, M., Magnes, M., Bojko, I., Borsukevych, L. M., Budzhak, V. V., Chorney, I., Iuga, A., Ivașcu, C. M., Kish, R., Kuzemko, A., Palpurina, S., Skokanová, K., Širka, P., Tokaryuk, A., & Dayneko, P. (2024). Agricultural legacy shapes plant diversity patterns in mountain grasslands of Maramureș and Bukovina: A cross-border perspective (Ukraine, Romania). People and Nature, 00, 1-17. https://doi. org/10.1002/pan3.10698