The Effects of Soil Moisture and Temperature on Vegetation Composition and Yield at Different Pasture Sites

This study was conducted in four different sections defined as Elmacik, Korukoy, Karahidir, and Kaynarca pastures of Kirklareli province in 2016. The focus of my research is to determine the effects of soil moisture and temperature on vegetation composition and herbage yield of the different natural pastures. Multivariate relationships between soil moisture and temperature with plant species were determined using redundancy analysis (RDA) using the CANOCO (4.5) program. When these measurement results were compared, soil moisture has strongly influenced herbage yield and distribution pasture species. It was found out that the plants such as Trifolium repens, Agrostis stolonifera , had a positive relationship with soil moisture. Using RDA, which is among the ordination analyses, the effect of environmental factors on species distribution and herbage yield was found to be very important on each axis. Likewise, it was determined that Lolium perenne (C 3 ) among these common species are found in moisture pasture site. It was obtained that there was a negative relationship between soil temperature and herbage yield. Avena fatua, Vulpia ciliata, Chrysopogon gryllus were common in sites with high temperature soil. The sites with the high ratios of perennial plants and herbage yield generally show parallelism with the sites with a high soil moisture. Annual plants were the most common in dry pasture sites.