Abstract
Mountain grassland, if site-speciic managed, is an important source of ecosystem services. However, by increasing altitude and slope, climatic constraints and limitation to the use of machinery are expected to increase the costs of forage production, increasing in turn the risk of abandonment. In order to assess the eeect of altitude and slope on the production costs for the mountain meadows in South Tyrol, a three-year study was locally conducted on about 100 elds with an altitude ranging between 1,300 and 2,100 m a.s.l. and a slope of between 3 and 86%. Costs of machinery and personnel, as well as an estimate of the forage yield, were assessed. e costs per hectare were found to depend on the slope only, while both the altitude and the slope aaected the costs per unit of weight.