Plants playing at home: Advantage of native plant seeds for ski slope revegetation in the French Pyrenees

Machine levelling for the creation or maintenance of ski slopes is a major source disturbance in high elevation ecosystems. Traditional, exogenous seed mixtures can help restoring plant cover and mitigate soil erosion, but they comprise species that are not ecologically adapted to conditions. Here, use local mixtures, harvested at nearby sites, was compared revegetation three machine-graded runs with different conditions French Pyrenees. The cover, biomasses associated microbial activity were recorded four years following seeding. results showed establishment highly dependent strongly differed between paired plots had received mixtures. In both treatments, some Poaceae dominated allowing settlement several spontaneous native species. But established more rapidly densely, included larger target, after seeding