Palaearctic Grasslands in Transition: Overarching Patterns and Future Prospects

The Palaearctic biogeographic realm covers about 45 million km2 (Table 2.1), which corresponds to 35 per cent of the terrestrial ice-free surface of the Earth and thus it is the largest out of the eight biogeographic realms (Olson et al., 2001). In geographic terms, this means Europe, Africa north of the Sahara and the Mediterranean, temperate, boreal and arctic zones of Asia (Fig. 2.1). The realm currently comprises circa 9.7 million km2 grasslands, which correspond to 22 per cent of its total area (Table 2.1) and thus the largest amount and likely also the biggest share of grasslands among all biogeographic realms. These grasslands are partly natural, partly secondary, that is, anthropogenic. In any case, they are of high ecological and economic importance, but at the same time subject to various severe threats. Here we introduce the Palaearctic section of Grasslands of the World. Apart from this introductory and synthesis chapter, the section consists of seven regional treatises, roughly arranged from the west to the east (Fig. 2.1): Western and Northern Europe (Dengler and Tischew, 2018), Eastern Europe (in the socioeconomic sense) (Török et al., 2018), the Mediterranean Basin and the Middle East (Ambarlı et al., 2018), Russia (Reinecke et al., 2018), Kazakhstan and Middle Asia (Bragina et al., 2018), China and Mongolia (Pfeiffer et al., 2018) and, last but not least, Japan (Ushimaru et al., 2018). These chapters have been organised by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (EDGG), an international scientific network, which deals with ecology, biodiversity, conservation and management of all types of natural and semi-natural grasslands throughout the Palaearctic biogeographic realm (Box 2.1).