Meadow

A meadow is an open habitat, or field, vegetated by grass, herbs and other non-woody plants. They may be sparsely covered with trees or shrubs, as long as they maintain an open character. They are 'semi-natural grasslands', meaning that they are largely composed of species native to the region, with only limited human intervention. Meadows can occur naturally under favourable conditions (see perpetual meadows), but they are often maintained by humans for the production of hay, fodder and livestock. They attract a multitude of wildlife and support flora and fauna that could not thrive in other habitats. They provide areas for courtship displays, nesting, food gathering, pollinating insects, and sometimes sheltering, if the vegetation is high enough, making them ecologically important. There are multiple types of meadows, such as agricultural, transitional, and perpetual, each important to the ecosystem. Meadows may be naturally occurring or artificially created from cleared shr...

Agricultural meadows edit In agriculture, a meadow is grassland which is not regularly grazed by domestic livestock, but rather allowed to grow unchecked in order to produce hay. Their roots go way back to the Iron Age when appropriate tools for the hay harvest emerged. The ability to produce livestock fodder on meadows had a significant advantage for livestock production, as animals could be kept in enclosures, simplifying the control over breeding. Surpluses in biomass production during the summer could be stored for the winter, preventing damages to forests and grasslands as there was no longer the need for livestock grazing during the winter. Especially in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the term meadow is commonly used in its original sense to mean a hay meadow, signifying grassland mown annually in the summer for making hay. Agricultural meadows are typically lowland or upland fields upon which hay or pasture grasses grow from self-sown or hand-sown seed. Traditional hay meadows ...

Artificially or culturally conceived meadows emerge from and continually require human intervention to persist and flourish. In many places, the natural, pristine populations of free-roaming large grazers are either extinct or very limited due to human activities. This reduces or removes their natural influence on the surrounding ecology and results in meadows only being created or maintained by human intervention. Existing meadows could potentially and gradually decline, if unmaintained by agricultural practices. Humankind has influenced the ecology and the landscape for millennia in many parts of the world, so it can sometimes be difficult to discern what is natural and what is cultural. Meadows are one example. However, meadows seem to have been sustained historically by naturally occurring large grazers, which kept plant growth in checked and maintained the cleared space. As extensive farming like grazing is diminishing in some parts of the world, the meadow is endangered as a habi...

Ecological consequences edit Climate changes impact temperature precipitation patterns worldwide. The effects are regionally very different but generally, temperatures tend to increase, snowpacks tend to melt earlier and many places tend to become drier. Many species respond to these changes by slowly moving their habitat upwards. The increased elevation decreases mean temperatures and thus allows for species to largely maintain their original habitat. Another common response to changed environmental conditions are phenological adaptations. These include shifts in the timing of germination or blossoming. Other examples include for example changing migration patterns of birds of passage. These adaptations are primarily influenced by three drivers: Increased temperature Changing precipitation patterns Reduced snowpack and earlier melting Effects of higher temperatures edit In response to temperature changes, flowering plants can respond through either spatial or temporal shifts. Spati...