**6. Grasslands and ecosystem services**

In simplest words, ecosystem services are defined as "various outputs, conditions, and processes of natural biological systems which in one way or other, directly or indirectly, benefit humans and significantly enhance their social welfare" [13, 16, 17]. These include a variety of processes by which grasslands produce a bunch of beneficial resources including forage for ruminants, clean water by serving as excellent watershed, ensuring biodiversity by offering favorable habitat to wildlife, etc. Globally, extensively managed grasslands have been recognized for having very high biodiversity that assists in maintaining and promoting a variety of social and cultural norms and values. Cultivated grasslands provide the maximum herbage yields of nutritious green forage for feeding grazing animals and various other benefits as illustrated in **Figure 1**. However, the range of ecosystem services offered by them is on the lower side compared to permanent grasslands in terms of total biomass production, herbs biodiversity for preparing cosmetics, etc.

In contrast to cultivated grasslands, permanent ones tend to provide a wider variety of ecosystem services as depicted in **Figure 2**. These grasslands maintain higher diversity of plant and animal species along with providing abundant herbs *Introductory Chapter: Grasslands Development - Green Ecological Economy and Ecosystem… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105345*

**Figure 1.**

*Various types of ecosystem services are offered by cultivated grasslands under changing climate scenarios.*

**Figure 2.**

*Various types of ecosystem services are offered by permanent grasslands under changing climate scenario.*

for medicine and cosmetics preparation and honey. However, biomass production is significantly lesser than in cultivated or improved grasslands and resultantly grazing ruminant's productivity is comparatively suboptimal. Lastly, semi-natural grasslands tend to have mixed characteristics of improved and natural grasslands, such as higher species diversity coupled with maximum nutrition biomass production owing to fertile soils.

Besides aforestated ecosystem services, grasslands tend to offer many other benefits such as seeds dispersal and preservation of abundant and endangered plant species, flood, and drought mitigate through effective maintenance of microclimate, recycling of macro and micronutrients in the soil as the plant life cycle goes on and detoxification of different wastes through decomposition [18, 19]. Additionally, grasslands ensure species biodiversity by providing suitable habitats and significantly contribute stability to micro and macro climate by restoring natural processes. Furthermore, these serve as an effective source to keep pests under

threshold levels due to higher biodiversity which maintains the predator-prey relationship in a natural way. Moreover, protecting the grasslands soil from different types of erosion (sheet and gully erosion) by maintaining living mulch or cover is one of the vital benefits offered by grasslands, which leads to the provision of clean water through protected watersheds. Lastly, the provision of recreation facilities owing to natural or improved esthetic value along with serving as excellent wetland and furnishing research opportunities (natural grasslands and cultivated lands comparative analyzes) are few of the ecosystem's services offered by grasslands.

In addition to agricultural-related benefits, grasslands can potentially offer some other benefits as well such as maintaining water supply and regulation of water flow regulation, carbon sequestration, mitigation of climate, and cultural advantages. To conclude, three types of ES can be extracted from grasslands including animals related ES services (nutritious forage production), cultural (recreation purpose), and micro-environment regulating ES services (pollination, biological control of different insect-pest, mitigation of gaseous emissions). There exist multiple synergies and trade-offs among ES services provided by grasslands and prevalent management practices, however appropriate management practices may potentially create more synergies and reduce trade-offs leading to the sustainable improvement of ES services. It is suggested that grasslands ES services and food security research along with policymaking must be given higher priority for boosting ruminant productivity alongside other ES services. A vital approach that integrates grasslands with modern agricultural production systems as well as land-use patterns optimization at the local and regional level can significantly improve livelihoods and food security. However, future research must focus on grasslands capacity to deliver a variety of ES services in relation to agricultural systems in order to develop sustainable, biologically viable, and economically attractive management options and strategies.
