| Woody plants often have characteristics that allow them to tolerate some level of browsing and the ability of plants to compensate for lost biomass is an important means of recovering from different kinds of biotic and abiotic damage. Compensatory growth has often been described following herbivory, but it also be considered as generalized response of plants to all kinds of damage, such as grazing, cutting, frost and trampling. A number of studies have found negative, neutral or positive effect of tissue loss on plant performance, suggesting that plant can partially, completely or overcompensate under some conditions. Plants can also respond to herbivory by increasing their defence levels. Provided the presence of allocational costs associated with both alternatives of defence, a negative correlation between them is expected.Caragana korshinskii Kom. is a long-lived shrub and commonly found in desert, semi-desert and Loess Plateau in northwestern China, where it plays an important role in soil and water conservation and desertification control, and its shoots are cut by the local farmers to use as fuel energy or browsed by many sheep before grasses turn green. In this study, C. korshinskii was examined for its ecological strategies (tolerance and resistance) to damage and physiological and biochemical metabolism change post damage. The clipping treatments included: control (intact), 30%, 60% main shoot length removal (30% RSL, 60%RSL), and 25%, 50%, 100% main shoot number removal (25% RSN, 50% RSN, 100%RSN). The browsing treatments included: control (intact), 50%, 100% leaf removal (50%LR, 100%LR) and 100% flower removal (100%FR). The results obtained here were summarized as follows:1. C. korshinskii had strong ability to compensate for fruit production after aboveground partial shoot removal. Seed production of 30% main shoot length removal (30% RSL) and...
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