Our Paper on "Biomass Partitioning Following Defoliation of Annual and Perennial Mediterranean Grasses"

Mario Gutman and Noam G. Seligman

• Responses to this Article
• Literature Cited

Published: March 25, 2002

In response to the critique by Jones (2002) of our paper (Gutman et al. 2001), we would like to comment that we are well aware of the differences between grazing and clipping, and that we also conduct experiments under real-world grazing conditions. We resort to clipping only to answer specific questions that require fully controlled and replicated experiments—as in the present case. In the paper, for comparison, we supplemented the clipping data with results obtained under actual grazing conditions. Clearly, this experiment is not the only basis for policy decisions, and if others will cite this study to draw incorrect conclusions and establish destructive policies, we can only regret their misunderstanding of the limitations—and value!—of experimental results.

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Gutman, M., I. Noy-Meir, D. Pluda, N. A. Seligman, S. Rothman, and M. Sternberg. 2001. Biomass partitioning following defoliation of annual and perennial Mediterranean grasses. Conservation Ecology 5(2): 1. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/Journal/vol5/iss2/art1

Jones, G. 2002. Questionable methods. Response to Gutman et al. (2001). "Biomass partitioning following defoliation of annual and perennial Mediterranean grasses."Conservation Ecology 6(1): ZZ. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/Journal/vol6/iss1/artz