Title: The Economic Consequences of Poor Soil Health in Vineyard Properties around the World

Biography:

Marlon Schwienbacher is a young conservation biologist. Marlon dedicated the last 3 years and his masterthesis at the University of Vienna to the topic of alpine wilderness. Last year he contributed to the managementplan of the second Austrian wildnerness area and coauthored a feasibility study on the implementation of international wilderness standards on an adjacent area.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to look at anthropogenic influences on primary succession processes of glacier foreland sites. This is one of the first studies which try to look at additional external factors, like sheep grazing, influencing species assembly processes of succession sites. These external factors have been nearly constantly overlooked when studying proglacial areas so far. Glacier forelands in Central Europe have been buried under ice masses since the Little Ice Age (LIA) or even the end of the early Holocene warm period, 8000 years ago, hence buried soils stayed completely untouched. Because anthropogenic influences, like grazing of domestic animals and hiking trails, can potentially alter the autogenous processes of glacier foreland sites, this study tries to disentangle these effects. For this study, a vegetation surveys including 144 relevés (Braun-Blanquet approach) was conducted in three valleys of the Venediger mountain range, Austria: one valley, the Untersulzbachvalley (“Untersulzbachtal”), is part of the special protected area “Wildnisgebiet Sulzbachtäler” where sheep are excluded, both other valleys, the Viltragenvalley (“Viltragental”) and Frosnitzvalley (“Frosnitztal”), are part of the core zone of the National Park Hohe Tauern, where extensive sheep pasturing is allowed. Differences in the species composition and richness between releves were analyzed with distance-based- Redundancy-Analysis (dbRDA) and Generalized-Mixed-Effect-Models (GLMM). Best models, based on the AIC (Akaike Information Criterion), were selected. Additionally, the effects of hiking trails on the space use of sheep were analyzed by Zero-inflated-Regression- Models. Results suggest that free roaming sheep are influencing plant species composition and richness of the two grazed glacier foreland sites, while the ungrazed special protected area did not show any of these patterns. Additionally, it was found that sheep highly favour areas closer to hiking trails, indicating that these anthropogenic infrastructures indirectly effect the surrounding vegetation.