Influence of management regime and harvest date on the forage quality of rangelands plants: the importance of dry matter content

We investigated the sources of variation in forage quality in plants from species-rich Mediterranean rangelands in southern France. Digestibility was affected by species growth form, harvest date, developmental stage and management regime, and differed between leaves, stems and reproductive parts. The dry matter content of the different plant parts, an estimate of the density of their tissues closely related to fibre content, emerged as a good predictor and an easily measured trait to estimate digestibility in the wide range of species spanned in our study.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  AoB Plants

• Publication date

  2016-08-02

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Medicine, Biology, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/aobpla/plw045PMID 27339049PMCID 4972474
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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