| Summary: | International audience The widely used concept of intensity of grassland management can be defined according to the fertilization level and defoliation frequency for mown meadows or to the stocking rate for pastures. Many questions arise for comparing situations over a large gradient of pedo-climatic conditions, or grazing, mowing and mixed grass utilizations. We therefore propose an index of intensity of grassland management, combining grazing and mowing, and considering regional differences in biomass productivity. A model predicting the percentage of grass eaten by the animals as a function of the stocking rate was developed based on field measurements. The index can sum this percentage of grass defoliated by grazing to that defoliated by cutting, considering that one cut defoliates 100% of the vegetation. Regional differences in biomass productivity are taken into account by dividing the sum of defoliations by the biomass productivity of grassland at the regional level, which is estimated from remote sensing images. This index could be used to roughly estimate management intensity when field measurements are not available and a large range of situations have to be compared.
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