The response of soil in a semi-arid landscape with SE orientation after early prescribed burning.

Abstract

The current forest fire regimes are increasing due to high temperatures, global warming and frequency of wildfires in dry ecosystems like in the Mediterranean Basin. These issues are decreasing ecosystem’s resistance and resilience, worsening desertification, for this reason, it is of great importance to analyze the effects on the soil. However, it is now possible to apply some preventive tools to avoid wildfire effects or reduce their impacts on ecosystems. Fire is used as preventive tool, prescribed burning (PB) change both the fuel loads in forest ecosystems and vegetation strata. However, fire can produce changes in soil characteristics and physico-chemical parameters.The studied PB was carried out in spring 2021 (early burn) in SE Spain. The mainly vegetation is shrub (i.e., Macrochloa tenacissima (L.) Kunth, Cistus Clusii Dunal, Salvia rosmarinus (L.) Schleid) with poor dry soils formed mainly by cambisols. For improve the knowledge at short/medium-term PB effects on soil, this study attempted to analyze the ecological early PB effects on semi-arid land soils by CO2 flow soil respiration (SR) automatic chamber (CFLUX-1 Soil CO2 Flux System), minidisk infiltrometers for soil hydraulic conductivity (SHC) by infiltration rate and Water Drop Penetration Time (WDPT) methodology for measuring soil water repellency (SWR). It also analyzed soil physico-chemical properties. In addition, this study tries to generate a protocol or guide of good practices for PB. There were no significant differences in any studied variables after the 1-year period according to our formulated hypotheses. However, effects were observed on some parameters on the first days after the PB, such as SOM and nutrients.