Abstract
Harvesting is a common method in grassland management. With shrub encroachment into grassland, special hydrological and physiological dynamics probably occur in the shrub-grass coexisted ecosystem after harvesting, which remains largely unclear. Therefore, this study aims to identify potential effects of harvesting on soil moisture pattern, phenology dynamics, and water utilization in a shrub encroached grassland. We monitored soil water for a year beneath the Caragana microphylla canopy and interspace grassland after harvesting. The results showed that the soil water content increased under shrubs and grass patches after harvesting, especially under later ones. The water storage in soil of 0–100 cm depth increased by 18.9 mm under grass but only 5.5 mm under shrubs. Harvesting also decreased the difference of water storage between shrubs and grass from 19.1 to 5.7 mm. More snowmelt compensation, less evapotranspiration, shorter growing season, and higher water use efficiency may jointly contribute to the water recovery of harvesting soil. This study contributes novel evidence to the ecohydrological impacts of harvesting on shrub-grass co-existed ecosystems, shows application value in controlling shrub encroachment process and provides fundamental insights for the further study on soil water dynamics of similar ecosystems worldwide.
Highlights
Harvesting, a common method in grassland, shrubland, and forest, has a long history in the pastoral area [1]
According to the grass biomass and the cover of interspace grass patches, the grass had already recovered to the original state
Euclidean nearest neighbor index (ENN) indicated the shrub patches were closer to the adjacent patches in the natural part than the harvesting part
Summary
Harvesting, a common method in grassland, shrubland, and forest, has a long history in the pastoral area [1]. Shrub encroachment is a global phenomenon associated with marked changes in ecosystem structure and function over the past 100–150 years [6,7,8]. In shrub-grass coexisted ecosystems, previous studies mainly focused on the restoration process after shrub clearing, such as coverage, species changes, biomass, tiller number, and nutrient regime etc. [9,10,11,12,13,14] Many of these studies have a common purpose on whether communities could be restored to grassland after harvesting, alleviating, or reversing the encroachment trends of shrubs into grasslands.
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