Grazers in a Protected Spanish Landscape
Context
Grasslands, covering large areas in multiple continents are significant ecosystems that support biodiversity, regulate climate and provide many other ecosystem services (Lewińska et al. 2023). The long history of human settlement and societal development reinforces the importance of grasslands (Jouven et al. 2010). The Mediterranean biome in the South West of Europe is part of a global biodiversity hotspot with a large number of endemic plant species and habitats heavily influenced by historic grazing patterns (Porqueddu et al. 2016).
Not only are Mediterranean biomes influenced by grazing, but the dynamics of the habitats are influenced through fire disturbance. Both fire and grazing alter ecosystem dynamics and their combined influence creates distinct outcomes that differ to their individual effect (Noy‐Meir 1995). In the Mediterranean, the interaction between grazers and the habitat is well studied and changes to grazing has been shown to lead to changes to soil carbon capture (Peco et al. 2017), photosynthetic productivity and forage quality (Castillo-Garcia et al. 2022) and defence against invasion (Díaz Cando et al. 2025).
As with many habitats globally, there are factors that place Mediterranean habitats at risk. These include climate change, especially drought and other hydrological changes with an associated fire risk; land use changes and degradation as well as the both the positive and negative influences of grazers (Zhang et al. 2025),(Buisson et al. 2020).
Not only does grazing activity help with current conservation directly and via the indirect interactions with other risks but they can also play key roles in ecosystem restoration. Since the translation of Frans Vera’s Grazing Ecology and Forest History (Vera 2000), interest in how vertebrate herbivores shape ecosystems has led to numerous studies and practical applications. Practical projects provide significant insight into the movement and ecology of herbivores. Two well known examples include Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands (Staatsbosbeheer 2025) and Knepp Wildland in the UK (Estate 2025).
Whilst these two well known sites are using herbivores to restore a variety of habitats directly, the understanding of how grazers support plant community assembly continues as well. The figure below, reproduced from Buisson et al. (2020), shows that not only is herbivory an important disturbance feature, the impact of grazers goes beyond this to include aspects such as seed dispersal too.
All this makes it clear that understanding how grazers move and behave is important, especially in Mediterranean ecosystems. To do this, more than 90 of individuals in sheep and goat herds have been tagged and tracked by researchers at the Service for the Evaluation, Restoration and protection of Mediterranean Agroecosystems in Granada, Spain. The herds involved in the tagging were located on expansive livestock farms within protected areas of Andalusia with data collected from October 2019 until August 2023 (Pérez-Luque et al. 2024).
Here I present the results of an analysis of part of this significant data set to examine how 9 goats utilise the area in which they have been tracked. This includes looking at their use of resources in the landscape and an investigation to see if we can highlight how they move across the landscape.
Analytical Approach
Before any analysis can begin, data must be retrieved, explored and basic statistics prepared. This will allow us to prepare a clean, appropriately formatted dataset ready for analysis. The data was retrieved from Movebank (study ID 3088763011) and exploration was undertaken following the details outlined in Smith et al. (2020).
Expand For Workflow Diagram
The dataset broke down as follows:
| Species | Number of Individuals Tracked | Total Days Tracked | Average Days Tracked | Total Locations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unrecorded | 24 | 9205 | 383.54 | 724792 |
| Capra hircus | 9 | 1550 | 172.22 | 141287 |
| Ovis aries | 54 | 13832 | 256.15 | 1345742 |
Following this analysis and splitting of the dataset, the same steps were repeated for the goat only data.
Outliers
Lets take a closer look at the steps in the workflow shown above. First a visual inspection of the data.
The data appears to be in 2 distinct areas. It is not possible to see outliers from this scale, so a closer look is required. To do this I have split the data into the two location groups.
Home Ranges
Resource Use
Movement Patterns and Behaviours
Describe and justify the methods used to analyse the data
Outcomes
Present numerical and visual results of your analyses.
Interpretation of Main Findings
Discuss the significance of your findings.
Conservation Perspectives
Explore the implications of your findings for conservation/management efforts.
Code
doi <- "10.5281/zenodo.10672141"
bib_entry <- cr_cn(doi, format = "bibtex")
# Append to existing bibliography
write(bib_entry, file = "ref.bib", append = TRUE)References
Buisson, E. et al., 2020. Key issues in northwestern mediterranean dry grassland restoration [online]. Restoration Ecology, 29 (S1). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/rec.13258.
Castillo-Garcia, M. et al., 2022. Understanding herbivore-plant-soil feedbacks to improve grazing management on mediterranean mountain grasslands [online]. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 327, 107833. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2021.107833.
Díaz Cando, P.E. et al., 2025. Enemy behind the gates? Predicted climate change and land‐use intensification likely speed up <scp>C4</scp> grass invasions in europe [online]. Journal of Vegetation Science, 36 (2). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jvs.70023.
Estate, K., 2025. Knepp wildland project. Available at: https://knepp.co.uk/.
Jouven, M. et al., 2010. Rangeland utilization in mediterranean farming systems [online]. Animal, 4 (10), 1746–1757. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1751731110000996.
Lewińska, K.E. et al., 2023. Beyond “greening” and “browning”: Trends in grassland ground cover fractions across eurasia that account for spatial and temporal autocorrelation [online]. Global Change Biology, 29 (16), 4620–4637. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16800.
Noy‐Meir, I., 1995. Interactive effects of fire and grazing on structure and diversity of mediterranean grasslands [online]. Journal of Vegetation Science, 6 (5), 701–710. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3236441.
Peco, B. et al., 2017. Effects of grazing abandonment on soil multifunctionality: The role of plant functional traits [online]. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 249, 215–225. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2017.08.013.
Pérez-Luque, A.J. et al., 2024. vreGI Virtual Research Environment Grazing Intensity: Monitoring Grazing Patterns in Andalusia Natural Protected Areas [online]. Available at: https://github.com/serpam/vreGI_db.
Porqueddu, C. et al., 2016. Grasslands in “old world” and “new world” mediterranean‐climate zones: Past trends, current status and future research priorities [online]. Grass and Forage Science, 71 (1), 1–35. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gfs.12212.
Smith, C., Uzal, A. and Warren, M., 2020. Statistics in r for biodiversity conservation. S.I., s.n.
Staatsbosbeheer, 2025. Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve. Available at: https://www.staatsbosbeheer.nl/uit-in-de-natuur/locaties/oostvaardersplassen.
Vera, F., 2000. Grazing ecology and forest history. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing.
Zhang, Z. et al., 2025. Editorial: Climate and environmental changes in circum-mediterranean regions [online]. Frontiers in Earth Science, 13. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/feart.2025.1594165.