Main ecological and environmental factors affecting forage yield and quality in alpine summer pastures (NW‐Italy, Gran Paradiso National Park)

Summer pastures in the European Alps play a crucial role in providing high quality forage for grazing livestock and encompass a wide variety of vegetation communities. The main issue of their management is the optimal exploitation of the available forage in relation to environmental constraints, aiming at obtaining the highest forage yield and quality from each vegetation community. In this work, we monitored six different vegetation communities characterized by contrasting topographic features and species compositions throughout the grazing season for two years. We performed botanical and phenological surveys, climate-related measurements, and herbage samplings to assess forage quantity and quality (i.e., digestibility and proximate composition, estimated by near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy). We analysed the influence of climatic, topographic, and vegetation variables on pasture herbage through univariate and multivariate analyses. The cover of wide-leaf grasses primarily promot...