Ecosystem service tradeoff between grazing intensity and other services - A case study in Karei-Deshe experimental cattle range in northern Israel

Abstract Grasslands cover around 25% of the earth's land surface and provide many essential Ecosystem Services (ES) to human well-being. Changes in grazing intensity have led to changes in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, resulting in loss of some of these ES. This emphasizes the need for grassland management schemes that aim to maximize economic returns from grasslands while maintaining ecosystem functioning, but tools to assess the tradeoffs between economic benefits and Ecosystem Services are, for the most part, lacking. This study is aimed at economically valuing multiple ecosystem services, and the tradeoffs between them and species richness, across different management alternatives (control, light, moderate and heavy grazing) in the Karei-Deshe experimental farm and Long Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) site. Ecological data from previous research in Karei-Deshe was valuated using the Replacement Cost Method and a Contingent Valuation survey, which valued the farm's landscape. Grazing intensity was inversely related to the delivery of ES studied and positively related to species richness, except for heavy grazing, which resulted in lower species richness. Only heavy grazing was found to be an inefficient management alternative. This research demonstrates a fairly simple path for providing land managers an ecological-data-based tool for comparing management alternatives.