Biological soil crust development affects physicochemical characteristics of soil surface in semiarid ecosystems
By Sonia Chamizo, Yolanda Cantón, Isabel Miralles, Francisco Domingo. 2012
351 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Water and nutrients are scarce resources in arid and semiarid ecosystems. In these regions, biological soil crusts (BSCs) occupy a large part of the soil surface in the open spaces surrounding patches of vegetation. BSCs affect physicochemical soil properties, such as aggregate stability, water retention, organic carbon (OC) and nitrogen (N) content, associated with primary ecosystem processes like water availability and soil fertility. However, the way BSCs modify soil surface and subsurface properties greatly depends on the type of BSC. We hypothesised that physicochemical properties of soil crusts and of their underlying soils would improve with crust development stage. Physicochemical properties of various types of soil crusts (physical crusts and several BSC development stages) and of the underlying soil (soil layers 0–1 cm and 1–5 cm underneath the crusts) in two semiarid areas in SE Spain were analysed. The properties that differed significantly depending on crust development stage were aggregate stability, water content (WC) (at −33 kPa and −1500 kPa), OC and N content. Aggregate stability was higher under well-developed BSCs (cyanobacterial, lichen and moss crusts) than under physical crusts or incipient BSCs. WC, OC and N content significantly increased in the crust and its underlying soil with crust development, especially in the first centimetre of soil underneath the crust. Our results highlight the significant role of BSCs in water availability, soil stability and soil fertility in semiarid areas.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Environmental Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d0bdf28de10107e7130cc73bc1f1bad39e91c48
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Environmental Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Biological soil crusts decrease erodibility by modifying inherent soil properties on the Loess Plateau, China (2017, background): “Biocrusts dominated by mosses (the later successional stage) can contain nearly twice as much organic carbon as cyanobacterial biocrust (the earlier successional stage) (Chamizo et al., 2012).”
- The interplay between microbial communities and soil properties (2023, neutral): “It is well established that biocrusts can influence the diversity and composition of microbial communities through shifts in key soil properties such as nutrient availability, water retention, pH, silt and clay content 127–129 .”
- Hydrolase enzyme activities in a successional gradient of biological soil crusts in arid and semi-arid zones (2012, neutral): “The higher availability of water in the upper layers of the BSCs suggests the start of aggregation process, simultaneous to the accumulation of carbon and nitrogen (Chamizo et al., 2012).”