Abstract
The land use change, principally the change from forest lands to cultivated ones, is one of the practices that have the highest impact in soil degradation in the World and, besides, provoke a great deal of CO2 emission to the atmosphere. So that is necessary to evaluate theses changes that occur in soils properties in different ecosystems, to take the appropriate conservation measures and improve soil management. In this paper, for a first time, the change of some soil properties due to land use change is studied, from the lowest and middle part of Membrillo micro-watershed in Manabi province, Ecuador. This micro-watershed has a hilly to premountian relief where primary and secondary forests, cocoa plantations and lands under maize cultivation are predominant, in the lowest part. The soils are Phaeozems, Cambisols and Fluvisols. In this paper we present the results obtained related to changes on soil morphological characteristics (color, structure and the A y B horizon thickness), organic carbon lost and the change on volume density, provoked by land use change.
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