IAI-Science-ISP3-077-005:Grazing, fire, and climate effects on primary productivity of grasslands and savannas

This metadata makes reference to the scientific article "Grazing, fire, and
climate effects on primary productivity of grasslands and savannas" which was
published in LL. Walker (ed.) "Ecosystems of disturbed grounds". Series
Ecosystems of the World, in 1999 on pages 287-305. This article belongs to the
project "A regional assessment of land use impact on ecosystem function and
structure in temperate areas of North and South America" (Number 077), from
Program ISP (Initial Science Program) Round 3 of IAI (Inter-American Institute
for Global Change Research).

The authors are Oesterheld, M., Loreti J., Semmartin M. y Paruelo J.M. The
objective of this chapter is to show the major effects of these three
disturbances on grasslands and savannas of the world. It is focus on those
aspects that the authors believe have received less attention and now because
of the existence of new data and the development of new ideas that they are in
the position of analyzing. The authors believe that most reviews have
concentrated on structural aspects of vegetation at the community level while
neglecting the functional ecosystem level attributes. Thus, they have chosen a
single functional response variable as the center of the chapter: aboveground
net primary productivity (ANPP). They have attempted to study the effects of
grazing, fire and climate fluctuations as agents of disturbance on productivity
in comparable ways considering their relative importance. They have framed all
the analysis in the context of a gradient of annual precipitation that
encompasses a wide range of grassland and savanna ecosystems. The chapter is
organized in the following way: first, they describe the disturbance regime of
grasslands and savannas; second, they show how disturbances affect aboveground
net primary productivity.