Trajectory based detection of forest-change impacts on surface soil moisture at a basin scale [Poyang Lake Basin, China

Abstract

Surface soil moisture plays a critical role in hydrological processes, but varies with both natural and anthropogenic influences. Land cover change unavoidably alters surface property and subsequent soil moisture, and its contribution is yet hard to isolate from the mixed influences. In combination with trajectory analysis, this paper proposes a novel approach for detection of forest-change impacts on surface soil moisture variation with an examination over the Poyang Lake Basin, China from 2003 to 2009. Soil moisture in permanent forest trajectory represents a synthetic result of natural influences and serves as a reference for isolating soil moisture alternation due to land cover change at a basin scale. Our results showed that soil moisture decreased in all forest trajectories, while the absolute decrease was lower for permanent forest trajectory (2.53%) than the whole basin (2.61%), afforestation trajectories (2.70%) and deforestation trajectories (2.81%). Moreover, afforestation has a high capacity to hold more soil moisture, but may take more than 6 years to reach its maximum capacity. Soil moisture increased from 14.09% to 14.94% for the afforestation trajectories with tree aging from 1 to 6 years. Finally, land cover change may affect soil moisture alternation toward different transformation directions. Absolute soil moisture decreases by 0.08% for the whole basin, 0.17% for afforestation and 0.28% for deforestation trajectories, accounting for 3.13%, 6.47% and 10.07% of the total decrease in soil moisture. More specifically, the transformation from woody Savannas, cropland and other lands to forest generated absolute soil moisture deceases of 0.20%, −0.08% and 0.27%, accounting for 7.26%, −3.52% and 9.57% of the decreases. On the other hand, the reverse transformation generated soil moisture deceases of 0.29%, 0.21% and 0.35%, accounting for 10.43%, 7.69% and 12.14% of the total decrease. Our findings should be valuable for evaluating the impacts of land cover change on soil moisture alternation and promoting effective management of water resources.