Nutritional Content of Alpine Grassland in Gran Paradiso National Park, 2013

112 grass samples collected in the Gran Paradiso National Park during 2013 estimate biomass, crude protein, fiber content, and digestibility. Data were used to validate the predictability of forage quality from remotely sensed data. The dataset was created by Luigi Ranghetti and colleagues for a 2016 publication in the European Journal of Remote Sensing.

Use Cases

• Predicting forage quality for livestock based on biomass and protein content measurements.
• Modeling grassland nutritional properties from satellite data using fiber digestibility metrics.
• Analyzing seasonal variation in alpine grassland composition based on day-of-year harvest data.
• Correlating plot elevation and aspect with nutritional content for ecological studies.

Strengths

• Contains 112 grass samples with multiple nutritional measurements per sample.
• Includes geospatial attributes like elevation and aspect for each of the 19 plots.
• Data is linked to a peer-reviewed publication, providing methodological context.

Limitations

• Data is from a single year (2013), limiting temporal analysis.
• Row count for the main data file is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Luigi Ranghetti

Collection Method

Field collection of grass samples within random plots from June to July 2013.

Time Range

2013

Geography

Gran Paradiso National Park, Western Italian Alps