It’s Not All About Cheese: Cows and Hikers are Not the Only Ones to Benefit from Alpine Pastures

Alpine pastures provide forage for cattle, storage for CO₂, food for pollinators, a habitat for countless plants, and fascinate us with their beauty. The extent to which these services are provided depends on location, climate – and cows.

Alpine pastures offer a wealth of services for humans and the environment. Researchers at Agroscope and the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany, studied the forage quantity and quality, carbon storage, resources for pollinators, aesthetics and biodiversity of alpine pastures. They wanted to know how these services were influenced by climate, site conditions and management. Unlike in the valleys, conditions in the mountains often vary greatly within a few metres. If we are to make best use of the many services provided by alpine pastures, it is essential to know which factors support them.

On six alpine farms in the Northern Alpine Foothills and in the Engadine region, the researchers studied 66 plots which varied in terms of slope, remoteness and grazing intensity, i.e. whether they were on flat or steep ground, close to or far from the farm, and frequently visited by cattle or rarely grazed. The cattle were fitted with GPS trackers to monitor how they use the space.

Diversity is the stand-out feature of alpine pastures

The study results show that alpine pastures are enormously diverse. Not only do site conditions vary at almost every step, but the ecosystem services provided by two adjacent plots can be entirely different. What is particularly striking is that variability within a single farm is mostly higher than among farms.

The study also demonstrated that the measured ecosystem services are tangled in a complex network of climate, site conditions and management: productive pastures that provide high forage quantity and quality generally have lower plant diversity and aesthetic appeal. In contrast, species-rich sites are generally aesthetically pleasing and offer abundant resources for pollinators. The warmer and flatter the site, the higher the forage quantity and quality and the higher the carbon storage, whereas dry sites have high plant diversity.

Cows enhance the character of different pastures through their behaviour

The management and movement behaviour of cattle also plays a part: more intensively managed plots provide more forage. The GPS data shows that cows favour areas with high forage quantity and quality. And because cattle like to spend time in these places, they contain higher concentrations of manure and therefore more nutrients. This leads to an increase in the amount of forage, which in turn attracts the cows. Places rarely visited by cows, however, offer more food resources for pollinators and a high level of biodiversity.

So would it be possible to control the movement of cattle to increase a particular ecosystem service? The study shows that a great deal of fencing would be needed to influence the cattle’s innate movement behaviour. But also that this would be unnecessary, because the heterogeneity of the pastures offers an enormous advantage: the small-scale differences, amplified by the behaviour of the cattle, enable a wealth of ecosystem services to exist alongside one another on the same farm.