Resilience of sown grasslands - our new paper in Ecological Solutions and Evidence

Our recent study by Réka Kiss  about the resilience of restored grasslands has recently been published in Ecology and Evolution.

Kiss, R., Lukács, K., Tóth, K., Tóth, Á., Godó, L., Deák, B., Valkó, O. (2026): Early sowing of multiple species supports the recovery potential of restored grasslands. Ecological Solutions and Evidence 7: e70247. https://doi.org/10.1002/2688-8319.70247

The paper is open access and can be freely downloaded from the journal website (please click here).

In this article, we explore why sowing grasses alone is not sufficient when aiming to establish species-rich grasslands, and why the early introduction of flowering species is essential following land abandonment or sowing grass seeds. We examine all this from the perspective of restored grasslands, by evaluating the role of disturbance (i.e. ploughing) in grassland recovery. Our study has a clear practical implication: our results show that we can restore more resilient grasslands if the target forb species are sown together with the grasses, as early as possible.

This is the second study resulting from our common garden experiment that we established in 2014, and we run it until 2022. Between 2014 and 2019 we studied vegetation recovery after nine restoration treatments (combinations of grass and forb sowing, with joint and delayed sowing) and published the first results in Kiss et al. (2022). Then we introduced a severe experimental disturbance – ploughing – to the sown parcels to study resilience of the grasslands restored by different methods.

This was a very interesting study, but also one of our most demanding studies: besides the long-term survey (survey of the 144 plots twice per year for 8 years), we needed to do the yearly maintenance of the experimental site. This involved multiple mowing, raking, sowing, soil preparation. This was a huge work and many thanks to all the people who took part in that!

Restored grassland with large cover of Salvia nemorosa - before ploughing

Grassland restored by grass seed sowing - before ploughing.

The maintenance of this experiment was highly demanding, sometimes mowing was very challenging