**5. Grasslands development strategies and green ecological economy**

The sustainable development of grasslands requires the adoption of integrated approaches for ensuring the grasslands improvement, having minimum disruption of local ecological systems and non-significant adverse effects on biodiversity of plant species [1, 3, 15, 16]. Different biologically viable strategies for grasslands development may include fertilizer application keeping in view the optimal combination of chemical fertilizers and organic manures along with planned grazing management. In addition, boosting the use of crop by-products such as green compost application for increasing grasslands soil fertility status, over-seeding of native leguminous plant species and manipulation of stocking rate (animal numbers that

can be successfully reared on a specific land area over a certain time period and expressed as animal units per unit land area) might be used as effective strategies for grasslands development. In addition, herbage allowance (grams of herbage dry matter per kg live weight per day per animal unit) adjustment offers one of the feasible solutions to over-grazing and over-utilization of grasslands.

To the best of our knowledge, concrete findings based on empirical results are still lacking for estimating and predicting the utilization efficacy and cost-effectiveness of grasslands development strategies. The situation is even worse for grasslands production systems and the instance of grasslands in sub-Himalayan regions of Jammu and Kashmir can be taken as a gauge study. The scientific evaluation and appropriate management of prevalent grazing systems need reliable and feasible assessment criteria without which grasslands productivity improvement will continue to remain a distant dream. Recently, a bunch of emerging technologies has contributed significantly in acquiring the timely and low-cost quantitative information for understanding the complex soil-pasture-grazing animals' interactions along with animal management with respect to grassland systems capacity and potential under changing climatic scenario. For instance, remote imaging might be useful for estimating the vegetation status in particular inaccessible grassland. In addition, a global positioning system (GPS) can also be put into practice for monitoring natural or man-induced factors like fire and over-seeding requirements due to heavy and uncontrolled grazing in a specific patch(s) of natural or improved grasslands. Moreover, improved diet markers and near-infrared (IR) spectroscopy along with using different modeling techniques may provide concrete and real-time information in order to take knowledge-based decisions regarding productivity constraints of grasslands and grazing animals. Furthermore, using individual electronic identification (EI) of different grazing animals may offer unprecedented opportunities to go for precision management of animal units that is bound to improve the productivity of milch animal, especially large ruminants. However, it must be noted that sustainably better and improved outcomes in terms of grazing animal products, services, and various by-products from natural or improved grasslands, can be feasible depending on devising clear and viable solutions that can be successfully employed in diversified environments and socio-technological circumstances of grasslands managers globally.
