Abstract
The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) has an important function in ensuring the water ecological security of China, even Asia, and the soil water storage of alpine grassland is an important part of the ecosystem water. Grassland degradation directly affects the soil water storage capacity. However, the impact of degradation on specific soil storage capacity, especially alpine shrubs, is rarely studied. Here, we chose two plots of alpine non-degraded shrub and degraded shrub, using the automatic soil moisture monitoring system to study the change process of soil moisture storage, and then adopted the boosted regression tree (BRT) model to quantitatively evaluate the relative influence of environmental variables on soil water storage. Our results show: (1) The soil water storage in the growing season (May–September) is higher than that in the non-growing season (January–April and October–December), and the soil water storage reaches its highest in mid-July. (2) During the growing season, the 100 cm soil temperature was the most important factor affecting the seasonal variation in soil water storage, accounting for 51% of the total variation. During the non-growing season, the 40 cm soil temperature was the most important factor affecting the variation in soil water storage, accounting for 80% of the total variation. (3) The soil water storage of non-degraded Potentilla fruticosa shrub meadow increased by 6–25%, compared with degraded grassland shrub meadow during growing-season. (4) Various meteorological factors have a weak impact on soil water storage.
Highlights
Soil water is a limiting factor for vegetation growth [1,2] and is an important part of water circulation in the soil–vegetation–atmosphere system; soil water storage plays a vital role in the ecological system and hydrological processes in the interaction between groundwater and surface water, with research in this field having acquired a global scale [3]
The rainfall was mainly concentrated in the growing season (80%), and the precipitation was lower in the non-growing season
Our results showed that soil water storage was less affected by the external climate and showed obvious characteristics of hydrothermal coupling
Summary
Soil water is a limiting factor for vegetation growth [1,2] and is an important part of water circulation in the soil–vegetation–atmosphere system; soil water storage plays a vital role in the ecological system and hydrological processes in the interaction between groundwater and surface water, with research in this field having acquired a global scale [3]. Many recent studies have shown that extensive evaluation of global-scale high-resolution satellite-based rainfall (SBR) products, especially IMERG-V5 and GSMaP-V7 [11–13], which can be a good alternative for monitoring daily precipitation, explains the merit of precipitation products in a near-real-time way. Dekai Lu (2018) indicated that accurately measuring light rainfall and winter snow was still a challenging task for the current satellite precipitation retrievals in the paper “Evaluation and Hydrological Utility of the Latest GPM IMERG V5 and GSMaP
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