So I was idly reflecting on the recent paper by Magurran et al. in Trends in Ecology & Evolution on long-term datasets for biodiversity monitoring which I Nibbled earlier, then I ran across another paper, and that really got me thinking. When we talk about protected areas, we usually mean national parks and reserves and the like (or at least that’s what I usually mean), but I wonder whether that misses something. I’m thinking here of long-term exclusion experiments, ((Including “accidental” experiments, perhaps.)) such as the one in Kenya that second paper talked about, for example. There must be other such things around the world: long-term experimental areas, rather than legally recognized reserves, but still (somewhat) protected, and with time series of vegetation and floristic data to boot. Is this something that has been looked at, either regionally or on a global scale, in the context of crop wild relatives conservation? Will investigate.
If you call saltbush and Acacia spp wild relatives of crop plants then the rangeland ecology work by the Botany Department, University of Adelaide at Middleback Station is certainly worth a look at; try google scholar: middleback station. RT Lange et al have done a lot of work on the impact of grazing, using exclusion plots for reference. A search for long term grazing exclusion leads to similar stories.