Journal
ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS
Volume 21, Issue 1, Pages 22-32Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1890/09-2369.1
Keywords
aeolian transport; erosion; fire; fluvial transport; grassland; livestock; resource redistribution; sediment transport; soil
Categories
Funding
- Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station
- U.S. Department of Agriculture Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service [CSREES 2005-38420-15809]
- National Science Foundation [NSF-DEB 0816162]
- Department of Energy [DE-AC52-06NA25396]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Rangelands are globally extensive, provide fundamental ecosystem services, and are tightly coupled human-ecological systems. Rangeland sustainability depends largely on the implementation and utilization of various grazing and burning practices optimized to protect against soil erosion and transport. In many cases, however, land management practices lead to increased soil erosion and sediment fluxes for reasons that are poorly understood. Because few studies have directly measured both wind and water erosion and transport, an assessment of how they may differentially respond to grazing and burning practices is lacking. Here, we report simultaneous, co-located estimates of wind-and water-driven sediment transport in a semiarid grassland in Arizona, USA, over three years for four land management treatments: control, grazed, burned, and burned + grazed. For all treatments and most years, annual rates of wind-driven sediment transport exceeded that of water due to a combination of ongoing small but nontrivial wind events and larger, less frequent, wind events that generally preceded the monsoon season. Sediment fluxes by both wind and water differed consistently by treatment: burned + grazed. burned >> grazed > control, with effects immediately apparent after burning but delayed after grazing until the following growing season. Notably, the wind : water sediment transport ratio decreased following burning but increased following grazing. Our results show how rangeland practices disproportionally alter sediment fluxes driven by wind and water, differences that could potentially help explain divergence between rangeland sustainability and degradation.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available