Abstract
Cutting and burning are common practices used to maintain Miscanthus-type grassland vegetation. However, 16year monitoring of grassland vegetation revealed that the two practices led to different botanical compositions, i.e. Miscanthus sinensis in cutting plot and Arundinella hirta in burning plot as a dominant species. The growing points of M. sinensis in the soil were distributed shallower than those of A. hirta at the time of the burning treatment, suggesting that the burning damage was severer in M. sinensis than in A. hirta. The difference in the depth of the growing points of the two species is considered to be one of the factors responsible for the differences in the vegetational changes between the cutting and burning treatments.
