Iranian Journal of Applied Ecology

Choosing management strategies are influencing the vegetation characteristics and plant diversity in rangelands. We have studied the effects of three management treatments including overgrazing, exclusure, and exclusure with restoration operations on vegetation characteristics of plant cover, composition, and diversity in Kiasar Chardange summer rangelands. In each management treatment, three random transects with the length of 50 m were established in the pasture and in five random plots of one square meter nested in the transects, the percentage of canopy cover, the composition of three palatability classes were recorded and the indices of plant diversity, plant evenness, species richness were calculated. For comparing the effects of different treatments on vegetation characteristics and diversity indices, an analysis of variance with equal subsamples was performed. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling was used to interpret the scattered patterns of plant compositions in relation to different management treatments. The results showed that all diversity, evenness, and richness indices were significantly different in three management treatments (p<0.05) The exclusure with restoration treatment had the highest indices of Simpson diversity (0.74), Shannon-Weiner diversity (2.12), Margalov richness (1.44), Mehnick (1.04), alpha diversity (6.13), and beta diversity (20.87). In contrast, the overgrazed site had the lowest values. The Camargo (0.77) and Smith-Wilson (0.87) evenness indices had the highest values for exclusure and the lowest values for exclusure with restoration treatments. Our findings could be a road map for future planning in similar sites. For rehabilitation of rangelands and improving plant diversity, restoration treatments in exclusures are recommended.