Abstract
Wind erosion results in soil redistribution and textural changes on topsoil. There is little information about how these changes affect plant production. Here, we compared simulations of vegetation growth between a wind-eroded scenario and an actual condition at two sites in Mongolian grasslands (steppe and desert steppe) using an ecosystem model. The wind-eroded scenario, topsoil (0–0.1 m depth) with 1% clay and 99% sand, was designed to represent an extremely wind-eroded soil surface that had permanently lost the fine particles and gained sand particles. Effects of temperature, nutrient, and water stresses on vegetation were quantitatively estimated. The model gave reasonably good simulations of the vegetation and soil water dynamics. Results show that water had more effect on plant production than nitrogen and temperature. In the wind-eroded scenario, stresses because of a lack of water and nutrients affected plant production. For the wind-eroded topsoil, plant production decreased (20.2%) in the desert steppe with increasing water stress, but it was slightly increased (5.0%) in the wetter steppe because of an inverse texture effect, where water infiltrates from the coarse topsoil to the deeper root-zone due to lower soil evapotranspiration and facilitates growth. Plant growth was, therefore, affected by the nitrogen supply.
Highlights
The area of degraded land in dryland areas is increasing at an alarming pace, threatening food security and environmental quality (UNCCD, 1994)
There were three seasonal phases of soil moisture, as follows: the spring drying between April and May until the onset of the rainy season, the summer recharge between late May and late July from summer precipitation, and autumn drying in August–October prior to the soil freezing because of the decrease in precipitation (Nandintsetseg and Shinoda, 2011)
At TsO, the values of Tstress were 0.787/0.787 for May, 0.057/0.057 for June–August, and 0.733/0.733 for September, respectively. These results show that water and nitrogen stresses influenced plant production in the critical growing season (June–August) in the Mongolian grasslands, and that temperature stress was only important in the emergence (May) and senescence (September) periods, respectively
Summary
The area of degraded land in dryland areas is increasing at an alarming pace, threatening food security and environmental quality (UNCCD, 1994). Wind erosion of soil is a global phenomenon that occurs in arid and semi-arid regions worldwide (Shao, 2008; Shinoda et al, 2011). Soil that is eroded by strong wind causes aeolian dust events that threaten human and livestock health, present risks to life, and cause environmental problems, such as land degradation and air pollution, and economic losses in both the source and downwind areas. These phenomena have triggered changes in global energy and carbon cycling in recent decades (Reichstein et al, 2013; Shao et al, 2011). Of the total land area affected by wind erosion worldwide, 549 million hectares are in major dust source regions (Middleton and Thomas, 1997), some of which are in northeastern Asia (Shinoda et al, 2014; Nandintsetseg and Shinoda, 2015)
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