Alpine Grassland Nutritional Content from Gran Paradiso National Park, 2012

142 grass samples collected every two weeks during the 2012 growing season in Gran Paradiso National Park. The dataset includes biomass, crude protein, fiber content, and digestibility measurements. Luigi Ranghetti and colleagues used this data to investigate relationships with remotely sensed data in a 2016 publication.

Use Cases

• Predicting forage quality for livestock grazing based on biomass and protein content measurements.
• Modeling the relationship between grassland nutritional properties and satellite-derived remote sensing data.
• Analyzing seasonal changes in alpine grassland fiber content and digestibility over the growing season.
• Studying the spatial variation of plant nutritional traits across 19 experimental plots at different elevations.

Strengths

• Data collection is temporally dense, with samples taken every two weeks throughout the growing season.
• Includes multiple nutritional metrics per sample: biomass, crude protein, three fiber types, and two digestibility measures.
• Associated with a specific, peer-reviewed scientific publication, providing context and validation.

Limitations

• Data is from a single year (2012) and a specific geographic region, limiting generalizability.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may complicate suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• Column-level documentation is absent from the provided metadata; field semantics must be inferred from the description.

Provenance

Source

Luigi Ranghetti

Collection Method

Field collection of grass samples from 19 experimental plots within Gran Paradiso National Park.

Time Range

2012 growing season

Geography

Gran Paradiso National Park, Western Italian Alps