ИСТИНА

A grazing project is under implementation since 2015 in the Tula region, near the Gurovsky quarry of HeidelbergCement Rus LLC. The project aims to restore a meadow in an abandoned arable field intended for limestone mining in 2025. The soil from this meadow will be used for the remediation of the quarry, which is being developed now. The restoration of biodiversity should strengthen the ecological functions of the natural meadow community. This will increase soil fertility, which will be used to restore the currently developed quarry. In 2015, the main part of the experimental plot was ploughed up and then grassed. We applied several methods of meadow restoration: - year-round grazing by livestock (10 Shetland ponies per 10 hectares of a 10-year-old poor meadow and 20 Kazakh white-headed cows per 42 hectares of sown grasses) and feeding it with hay collected from the natural meadow, - extended over time mosaic mowing of grass in hayfields (30 ha), - sowing hay from natural meadows on parts of hayfields (1 ha), - planting target species and sowing them in hayfields. The number of plant species increased in the pony pasture from 69 to 103 species, in the cow pasture from 109 to 136 species, and in the hayfield from 104 to 137 species. The average aboveground plant biomass was 3.7 t/ha in the parts of the hayfield sown with hay from the natural meadow, 2.0 t/ha in the rest of the hayfield and 3.0 t/ha in the cow pasture. For comparison, it was 3.2 t/ha in a natural meadow. The average hay yield in the Tula region in 2016 was 2.1 t/ha. The fastest restoration is in the plot mown for hay, sowed with the seed mixture from the natural meadows. The invasive species Solidago canadensis and Erigeron annuus damage the meadows under restoration. The vegetation of the experimental plot belongs now to the basal and derivate communities of the Molinio-Arrhenatheretea class.