Episode 2. Farmer jail, the first rule of ecology club and carry on with your dull stuff.

We're staying in Ireland for Episode 2 and talking about a research paper that looks at four different pasture types (permanent pasture, perennial ryegrass, a six species mixture and a twelve species mixtures) under grazing. They measured yields, nutritive value and how plant species persisted and it's all fascinating stuff (it helps, if you keep telling yourself that). There's more. Paul cries at a boat. Michael reveals his Joel Williams man-crush. And there's four jokes. Here are the links. First things first; a link to a biograph of Fridtof Nansen. There's loads of stuff about him on the interweb, but this one also gets you into The Polar Exploration Museum website (where the boat is). https://frammuseum.no/polar-history/explorers/fridtjof-nansen-1861-1930/ The main paper Shackleton, J., Boland, T.M., Kennedy, J., Grace, C., Beaucarne, G., Kirwan, S.F., Schmidt, O. and Sheridan, H., 2024. Annual and seasonal dry matter production, botanical species composition, and nutritive value of multispecies, permanent pasture, and perennial ryegrass swards managed under grazing. Grass and Forage Science, 79(4), pp.630-650. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gfs.12691 This is the Dee et al (2023) paper about how diversity (species richness) affects yields in grasslands. It's probably behind a paywall, but essentially they look at previous studies, take confounding factors into account, and integrate the results to get to a conclusion, which is; "Contrary to many prior studies, we estimate that increases in plot-level species richness caused productivity to decline: a 10% increase in richness decreased productivity by 2.4%." Dee, L.E., Ferraro, P.J., Severen, C.N., Kimmel, K.A., Borer, E.T., Byrnes, J.E., Clark, A.T., Hautier, Y., Hector, A., Raynaud, X. and Reich, P.B., 2023. Clarifying the effect of biodiversity on productivity in natural ecosystems with longitudinal data and methods for causal inference. Nature Communications, 14(1), p.2607. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37194-5 Here's the Raedts and Langworthy plantain paper. It's behind a paywall. Sometimes if you Google the title, you can find a free copy on the interweb somewhere. If not, go to the next one. Raedts, P. and Langworthy, A., 2018. Establishing plantain in spring in existing perennial ryegrass pastures in northern Tasmania. Animal Production Science, 60(1), pp.114-117. https://www.publish.csiro.au/AN/AN18575 This is the open access paper on establishing plantain. Bryant, R.H., Dodd, M.B., Moorhead, A.J., Edwards, P. and Pinxterhuis, I.J., 2019. Effectiveness of strategies used to establish plantain into existing pastures. Journal of New Zealand Grasslands, pp.131-138.  https://www.nzgajournal.org.nz/index.php/JoNZG/article/view/406/63    

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