Wednesday 2 July 2014
A meadow is a field habitat vegetated by primarily grass and other non-woody plants (grassland). Meadows have ecological importance because their open, sunny areas attract and support flora and fauna that couldn't thrive in other conditions. Meadows may be naturally occurring or artificially created from cleared shrub or woodland. They often host a multitude of wildlife, providing areas for courtship displays, nesting, gathering food or sometimes sheltering if the vegetation is high enough. Many meadows support a wide array of wildflowers, which makes them of utmost importance to insects like bees, pollination, and hence the entire ecosystem. In agriculture, a meadow is grassland which is not regularly grazed by domestic livestock, but rather allowed to grow unchecked in order to produce hay. A transitional meadow occurs when a field, pasture, farmland, or other cleared land is no longer cut or grazed and starts to display luxuriant growth, extending to the flowering and self-seeding of its grass and wild flower species. The condition is however only temporary, because the grasses eventually become shaded out when scrub and wSourceoody plants become well-established, being the forerunners of the return to a fully wooded state. Source
