Monitoring Grazing Behavior Of Mongolian Horses

Grazing behavior is a manifestation of the interaction between grazing livestock and vegetation.The Mongolian horse is one of the oldest horse breeds in the world.With the increasing number of horses raised,the Mongolian horse not only drives the replacement of grassland vegetation resources,but also plays an important role in the grazing system.In order to understand the grazing behavior rhythm of Mongolian horses and reveal the relationship between livestock and vegetation communities,this study took Xilamuren grassland in Darhan maoming’an United Banner,Baotou City,Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region as the research area from July to September 2022,and set three different grazing intensities(no grazing,light grazing and heavy grazing).The visual intelligent monitoring equipment and manual monitoring were combined to obtain the changing rules of Mongolian horse grazing behavior.In order to reveal the relationship between grazing livestock and vegetation community environment,community characteristics and community diversity were investigated.The results show that:1.There is a certain activity rhythm in the course of daytime feeding behavior of Mongolian horses,which usually takes midday drinking behavior as the time dividing point,and takes "grazing-standing-wandering-grazing-standing-wandering-drinking-resting" as a cycle of morning activities,which lasts about two times during the observation period(7:00-19:00).Feeding behavior occupied more than 60% of the time in the whole grazing behavior,and the overall performance was: grazing time > standing time > wandering time > resting time.2.The change of grazing behavior is affected by month,grazing intensity and two factors.Mongolian horses would adjust the time of each behavior to actively respond to the changes of the month.With the passage of the month,the grazing time increased gradually,the resting and standing time decreased gradually,and the wandering time showed a trend of decreasing first and then increasing.Grazing intensity can significantly affect grazing behavior of Mongolian horses.With the increase of grazing intensity,grazing time and wandering time increase gradually,while standing time and resting time decrease gradually.3.Through the investigation of the community characteristics of 31 species of plants in 16 families in the experimental plots,it was found that different grazing intensity treatments had significant effects on the height,coverage,density and biomass of vegetation,and grazing intensity significantly affected the changes of community characteristics: with the increase of grazing intensity,all indexes of vegetation community showed a decreasing trend.Simpson dominance index,Shannon-Wiener index and Margarlef richness index all reached the maximum under light grazing treatment.Month can also cause changes in the characteristics of vegetation community.The maximum biomass and height of community reach in August,but the influence of month on the characteristics of vegetation community is not significant.4.There is a certain correlation between grazing behavior and changes of plant community characteristics.The aboveground biomass of Mongolian horses was negatively correlated with feeding and walking behavior,but positively correlated with standing behavior.Simpson dominance index,Shannon-Wiener index and Margarlef richness index were also negatively correlated with eating and walking behavior,but positively correlated with standing behavior.