Abstract
BackgroundForests have been grazed for millennia. Around the world, forest grazing by livestock became a controversial management practice, gradually restricted in many countries over the past 250 years. This was also the case in most Central and Eastern European countries, including Hungary, where forest grazing was a legally prohibited activity between 1961 and 2017. Until the 2010s, ecologists and nature conservationists considered it merely as a historical form of forest use. As a result, there is little contemporary scientific information available about the impact of forest grazing on vegetation and the traditional ecological knowledge associated with it. Our aim was to explore and summarize this type of knowledge held by herders in Hungary.MethodsWe interviewed 58 knowledgeable herders and participated in forest grazing activities in 43 study locations across the country. The results were analysed qualitatively.ResultsWe revealed a living ecological knowledge tradition and practice of forest grazing in native and non-native forest stands. The impact of livestock grazing on native and non-native forests is not considerably different, in the view of the herders. For both forest types, the greatest impact of grazing was the suppression of the shrub layer, while grazing also increased the dominance and palatability (“tameness”) of the grasses. Livestock could cause significant damage to seedlings during forest grazing, but if done with care, grazing could also be an integral part of forestry management.ConclusionsSustainability of current forest grazing practices depends on the depth of local and traditional knowledge applied and herders’ stewardship. We stress the importance of collaborating with holders of local and traditional knowledge in order to gain a better understanding of the effects of livestock grazing on vegetation in temperate forests.
Highlights
Living forest grazing practices Herders reported carrying out forest grazing in native, non-native, and mixed native and non-native forests (Fig. 1)
Most herders stated that forest grazing was generally good for livestock, in many cases forests were only used as supplementary pastures
Our results show that closed canopy forests still provide a meaningful resource for livestock grazing in Hungary
Summary
There are numerous factors behind this, such as the degradation of the natural environment and changes in traditional lifestyles [4, 5] These have been induced and/or reinforced by centralised, top-down regulations, which have obstructed traditional human-nature connections by imposing restrictions on usage practices, and withdrawing land-use rights that keep TEK alive [6,7,8,9]. Continuing fortress-type conservation management further exacerbates these difficulties [9] Despite these circumstances, pastoral communities possess living traditional ecological knowledge that may offer solutions for resilient natural resource management around the world [9]. To maintain and support these activities at a time of dramatic change in socio-ecological systems, it requires cooperation between different stakeholder groups, for example, by carrying out knowledge co-production [8, 11,12,13]
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