Forage productivity in native grasslands of Haharu Sub-district, East Sumba District, Indonesia

Abstract

Abstract. Watuwaya BK, Syamsu JA, Budiman, Useng D. 2022. Forage productivity in native grasslands of Haharu Sub-district, East Sumba District, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 23: 362-1368. The identification and management of native grasslands are important to ensure the availability of beef cattle feed in smallholder farms. This study aims to identify the existing native grasslands in Haharu Sub-district, East Sumba District, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia and analyze the botanical composition, biomass and the carrying capacity of the native grasslands. We used the combination of remote sensing approach and field survey to identify and measure the productivity of native grasslands. Sentinel 2A imagery was used to identify the area of existing native grasslands using Supervised Classification - Maximum Likelihood method. Meanwhile, the productivity of native grasslands was measured using the Dry Weight Rank method. The results of remote sensing and spatial analysis showed that the existing area of native grasslands in Haharu Sub-district was 324,10 km2 with an Overall Accuracy of 98.63% and Kappa Accuracy of 0.98. The vegetation analysis showed that the botanical composition of native grasslands consisted of grasses 94.42%, legumes 3.55% and weeds 2.07%. The carrying capacity of the studied grassland was 0.68 AU/ha/month in the wet season. In conclusion, the productivity of existing native grasslands in the wet season is still low and special efforts are needed to improve the quality.