Effect of grass reseeding on dry matter production and species composition of a community rangeland in Jodhpur, Rajasthan

Abstract

The study was conducted on a community rangeland in Ajeetnagar, Bawarli, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India from 2015 to 2017. The objective was to investigate the effect of reseeding and soil depth on plant biomass production, density and botanical composition. There were nine treatments and replicated six times. The design of the study was factorial randomized block design. The frequency of the grass reseeding and depth of the field were the two factors. The levels of reseeding comprised control, reseeding once and twice while the levels of soil depth comprised shallow, medium and deep soils. Higher (P<0.05) plant dry matter (1645 kg/ha) was recorded in the area reseeded twice compared with the unseeded area. Deep soils (>20 cm depth) recorded 24, 106 and 14% higher total dry matter, perennial grass dry matter and annual grass dry matter compared to the shallow soil depth (<10 cm). Perennial grass density was higher (P<0.05) in the area reseeded once (15 plants/m2 ) compared to the area reseeded twice, while it was higher for annual grasses and forbs for the unseeded area (29 and 18 plants/m2 ).The medium (<20 cm depth) and deep soils (>20 cm depth) recorded significantly higher density of perennial grasses which was 48 and 32% higher than the shallow soils that recorded 9.97 perennial grasses/m2 . In medium deep soils, annual grasses contributed 48.40% in the botanical composition followed by perennial grasses (30.67%) and forbs (20.93%). It was concluded that reseeding the rangeland once increased dry matter production and species composition. Based on the present investigation, rangeland rehabilitation strategies such as reseeding could be adopted to restore the ecosystem services in degraded rangelands.