Grass community composition and grass traits
The most common grass species were Panicum maximum , occurring in 54 plots (90% of the total number sampled), Brachiaria deflexa(52 plots; 86.7%) and Tragus berteronianus (49 plots, 81.7%; see Table 3). The most abundant in terms of the mean cover per plot wasBothriochloa radicans (14.1%, present in 20 plots),Hyparrhenia hirta (6.6% in 8 plots), and Themeda triandra(5.8% in 21 plots).
Using multivariate analyses with habitat, bedrock, and spatial arrangements as covariates, we did not find any significant effects of herbivore abundance and species richness on grass species’ covers (F = 0.9, p = 0.66). Similarly, there was no effect of the abundance of particular herbivore species on grass species covers (p = 0.162); only when testing individual species by the forward selection, the effect of hippo (F = 2.9, p = 0.012) and scrub hare (F = 1.6, p = 0.092) had significant and marginally significant effects, respectively.
We did not find a significant effect of the herbivore abundance and species richness (F = 0.3, p = 0.932) nor by the abundances of individual herbivore species (F = 0.9, p = 0.592) on the mean grass traits.