Abstract
Soil fertility is important factors for growth and productivity of vegetation. The relationship between vegetation and soil fertility deserves attention due to its scientific importance and practical applications. However, the effects of soil fertility on vegetation development and succession are poorly documented. Here we study soil fertility in Yanhe watershed at northern Shaanxi on five different land uses, namely shrubland, farmland, natural grassland, woodland, and artificial grassland, and in soil under restoration for 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25. Attribute recognition model based on entropy weight was used to evaluate the soil fertility of typical region in the Loess Plateau of China, which contained 52 soil samples with 6 physical and chemical indexes, including soil organic matter, soil total nitrogen, total phosphorus, etc. The results show that (1) Land use has an obvious effect on soil bulk density, total porosity and capillary porosity of surface layers, but not significant in the subsurface layer; (2) SOM, Ntotal, Nhydro and Kavail are the most in shrubland and woodland while Ptotal and Pavail in farmland, respectively; (3) Vegetation succession on eroded soil result in significant changing of soil fertility; and (4) Vegetation succession on eroded soil result in significant changing of soil fertility.
Highlights
Soil fertility is important factors for growth and productivity of vegetation [1,2,3]
Study area The study area was located in Yanhe watershed of the Loess Plateau at N 36°23′-37°17′and E 108°45′-110°28′ in northern Shaanxi Province and had 25 years of comprehensive management because one ecology station was founded in this area (Figure 1)
While artificial grassland has a lower contain in all soil fertility indexes
Summary
Soil fertility is important factors for growth and productivity of vegetation [1,2,3]. Vegetation structure, soil moisture and nutrients have very close relationship. Different soil nutrients affect vegetation community the size of the biomass, species composition and diversity [4]. Soil nitrogen determines the productivity, biodiversity and species invasive capacity of vegetation communities [5,6,7]. Phosphorus is a restrictive factor in a variety of soil types, and determines the size of vegetation productivity and change of species composition [8,9,10,11,12]. Potassium affects community biomass [10] and state of vegetation water, and help to overcome soil moisture stress [13]. Over exploitation of existing vegetation further aggravates the problem of land
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