Meliorative Efficiency of Shrub Coulisses in Arid Pastures of Southern Russia

Abstract

The paper describes a long-term experiment (2008–2018) on the influence of shrub coulisses on the vegetation cover of semidesert, degraded pastures. Changes in the height of the snow cover in winter, the reserve of productive moisture in the soil, the species composition, and the productivity of arid pastures in the dynamics of growth and development of shrub coulisses were studied. The experiments were carried out according to the methods of the All-Russia Scientific Research Institute of Agroforestry (Pavlovsky, 1973), the All-Russia Scientific Research Institute of Feed (Metodika…, 2015), and Dospekhov (1985). As a result, it was found that, with an increase in the height of teresken bushes, the snow-cover height increased on average by 3.5–11 times in comparison with a natural pasture without coulisses, depending on the amount of precipitation. In the first five years, the productive moisture reserve in the soil increased by 7.2–9.1 mm. When the coulisse height reached more than 1 m, it increased by 8.8–24.8 mm. Ten years later, on the site with coulisses, the number of dominants in the plant association increased by four species. Starting from the third year of teresken vegetation, the productivity of the pasture with coulisses grew 1.3–3.9 times over the years of research.