Resilience of Soil Properties to Land‐Use Change in a Tropical Dry Forest Ecosystem

Abstract

Land‐use change in tropical dry forests can dramatically alter soil properties, but little is known about their resilience. We assessed soil resilience by examining resistance to, as well as recovery from, pasture use by smallholder farmers in western Mexico. We measured 25 soil and vegetation properties and compared old‐growth forest (OGF) sites and pastures to evaluate resistance to pasture use. We assessed whether those properties recovered to OGF reference values after pasture abandonment by analyzing the trajectories of properties along a chronosequence of secondary vegetation. Finally, we assessed whether recovery of soil properties could be inferred from the recovery of vegetation properties. Nine out of 25 properties differed significantly between the OGF sites and pastures. From these nine nonresistant properties, six (i.e., penetration resistance, soil C concentration, soil C/N, basal area, individual density, rarefied species richness of woody vegetation) showed recovery as a significant positive relationship with forest age. In contrast, surface litter C, litter C/N, and soil available P showed no resistance and no recovery within the successional period examined (up to 35 y). The best vegetation indicator for the recovery of some soil properties was woody species richness. This may suggest that functional differences of colonizing plants matter for recovery after pasture use. Our findings indicate that soil was overall resilient to pasture use, but some properties did not recover synchronously with vegetation properties during succession. Thus, more attention should be paid to soil function, because full ecosystem recovery is often inferred from the recovery of vegetation properties. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Comparison of social-ecological resilience between two grassland management patterns driven by grassland land contract policy in the Maqu, Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

“…Ecological resilience is evolving into a credible paradigm for sustainable policy development, particularly for better environmental management to help preserve natural capital in a rapidly globalizing world (Spears et al, 2015). The diversity of species and their specific responses to the variation, heterogeneity, and redundancies and connectedness of habitats, as well as governance and management plans are known to influence the resilience of an ecosystem (Ayala-Orozco et al, 2016;Bengtsson et al, 2003;Cutter et al, 2008;Nyström et al, 2000;Oliver et al, 2015b;Sara and Nico, 2015). In the social sciences, resilience is often applied to describe the ability of groups or communities to buffer disturbances, and consequently, to self-organize, learn and adapt despite the existence of adversity emanating from social, political and environmental changes (Luthar and Cicchetti, 2000).…”

“…Human actions and nature form a tightly coupled system, so an appropriate degree of natural resource management is sometimes warranted to increase the resilience of an ecosystem to exogenous factors such as stress or disturbances (Chambers et al, 2014). This can also assist in the promotion of the overall well-being of humanity (Ayala-Orozco et al, 2016). A transformation of strategies to increase resilience from the conceptual stage to the implementation stage is rather difficult or even impossible in some circumstances, due to the mismatch across different disciplines and scales, and underlying field conditions.…”

Atlantic Forest topsoil nutrients can be resistant to disturbance and forest clearing

“…In preserved mature tropical forests, where only small‐scale disturbances occur, such as treefalls (Chazdon, ), the soil usually retains its natural properties (Osman, ; Powers & Marín‐Spiotta, ). In contrast, in forests under natural regeneration changes in soil properties (Ayala‐orozco, Gavito, Mora, Siddique & Balvanera, ; Lewis, Castellano & Kaye, ; Reiners, Bouwman, Parsons & Keller, ) and plant communities usually occur (see e.g., Liebsch, Marques & Goldenberg, ). Following a disturbance, vegetation removal increases nutrient losses through runoff and leaching, but thereafter, the establishment of initial successional vegetation helps to prevent further losses.…”

The Impact of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Husbandry on the Biophysical Characteristics of Soils in Neotropical Agroecosystems

“…They are considered as fragile ecosystems because millions of hectares have been converted from neotropical forest into agricultural or pasture lands in the last decades and abandoned as well forming secondary forests [35]. as this is part of the philosophy of promoting soil conservation by FAO [36,37].…”