The concept of site quality for rangeland

Internationally, already from the ’30s at the USA, range site was the succession of the forest site quality implementation. After a while, the concept of range site was re-assigned and renamed to ecological site. In U.S.A., Canada and Australia, the evaluation of ecological site is based on rangelands’ climate, topographic and soil characteristics. In Europe, the only methodic researches on range site have been in Great Britain. But these researches considered all the rangelands as a degrading topographic, pedologic and plant sociological site quality. In Greece, the first reference to site quality was at ’60. The concept was based on the theories of that time in U.S.A. Later, because of the Greece’s mountain peculiarities; site quality was identified with the productivity. This identification is similar to the forest science where site quality is being determined by biotic and abiotic characteristics of the site.