Abstract: Predicting how biodiversity and ecosystem functioning will respond to ongoing environmental change, especially in Himalayas that are warming faster than the global average, is limited by key knowledge gaps. Ecologists from all across the world are curious about the efforts and approaches that would help us plug these knowledge gaps in order to enable a global synthesis. Hence, we initiated long-term observational and experimental studies in Kashmir Himalayan grasslands to quantify the effects of top-down and bottom-up forces (for instance, herbivory, grazing, mutualism, antagonism, fire) in regulating the plant community dynamics. The comparison of results with other sites along a major environmental gradient across India through the Indian Long-term Ecological Network, and with other sites across the globe through a network called BugNet, is hallmark of this study. The use of grazing exclosures and Open Top Chambers (OTCs) helped us disentangle the impact of grazing and climate warming on community composition, productivity, and diversity. The initial results provide useful insights as to how insect herbivores, molluscs and fungal pathogens, and their interactions, differ in their impact on plant communities. The absence of grazing increased the biomass of all functional groups (sedges, grasses, legumes, and forbs). We found that grazing exclusion is a useful strategy to boost forage growth and soil carbon sequestration in the study sites and the effect is stronger at locations with more precipitation. It seems that taking into account the trade-off relationship between vegetation restoration and maintenance of plant diversity, other traditional practice such as rotation and periodic grazing, is paramount for management plans to restore degraded grasslands. The implications of our results on species invasions via enemy release are also discussed. Overall, the promise of our design for observational and experimental studies to help understanding the role of large mammalian herbivores, invertebrate herbivores and fire regimes etc. in regulating plant community dynamics, is going to be of special interest to the global community of ecologists.
