Influence of land cover changes on the physical and chemical properties of alpine meadow soil

Abstract

Taking the alpine cold meadow grassland in the southeastern part of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau as an example, this research deals with the characteristics of alpine meadow soil property changes, including soil nutrients, soil physical properties and soil moisture content under different land coverage conditions. With the degradation of grassland vegetation and the decline of vegetation coverage, soil compactness reduces, gravel content increases and bulk density increases. The originally dense root-system layer is gradually denuded, making the soil coarse and gravel. The change of the organic matter contents with the vegetation coverage change in the surface soil layer (0–20 cm) has shown an obvious cubic polynomial curve process. The organic matter contents increase rapidly when land coverage is above 60%, contrarily decreases on a large scale when land coverage is below 30%. Between 30%–60% of land coverage the organic matter contents remain stable. The total N and organic matter contents in soil have shown quite similar change regularity. Following this the mathematic equations are derived to describe such change processes. Moisture content in soil changes sharply with the vegetation coverage change. Soil moisture content change with the vegetation coverage change has shown a quadratic parabola process. Results have shown that organic matter content and the total N content of the alpine meadow soil decrease by 14890 kg/hm² and 5505 kg/hm² respectively as the vegetation coverage reduces from 90% to less than 30%. The heavy changes of soil physical and chemical properties with grassland degradation have made the recovery of alpine meadow ecological system impossible. The protection of alpine meadow vegetation is of vital importance to the maintenance of the regional soil environment and the regional ecological system.