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Spatial distribution of the soil organic carbon pool in a Holm oak dehesa in Spain

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Abstract

Aims

Dehesas are agroforestry systems characterized by scattered trees among pastures, crops and/or fallows. A study at a Spanish dehesa has been carried out to estimate the spatial distribution of the soil organic carbon stock and to assess the influence of the tree cover.

Methods

The soil organic carbon stock was estimated from the five uppermost cm of the mineral soil with high spatial resolution at two plots with different grazing intensities. The Universal Kriging technique was used to assess the spatial distribution of the soil organic carbon stocks, using tree coverage within a buffering area as an auxiliary variable.

Results

A significant positive correlation between tree presence and soil organic carbon stocks up to distances of around 8 m from the trees was found. The tree crown cover within a buffer up to a distance similar to the crown radius around the point absorbed 30 % of the variance in the model for both grazing intensities, but residual variance showed stronger spatial autocorrelation under regular grazing conditions.

Conclusions

Tree cover increases soil organic carbon stocks, and can be satisfactorily estimated by means of crown parameters. However, other factors are involved in the spatial pattern of the soil organic carbon distribution. Livestock plays an interactive role together with tree presence in soil organic carbon distribution.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Remedios Cubillo and Beatriz Ortiz for laboratory support and Emilien Simonot for his valuable previous work. We would like to thank the managers of El Dehesón, and particularly Celia López-Carrasco, for their practical support. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Ms Pru Brooke-Turner and Mr Adam Collins for their linguistic assistance. This study has been partially funded by the projects AGL2010-16862 and SUM2006-00034-C02 and the Ramón y Cajal Program from the Spanish Ministry of Education, and preliminary results have been presented in the frame of COST Action 639 (BurnOut).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Silviculture and Pasciculture Department of Forestry Faculty, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Nuria Simón, Fernando Montes, Eugenio Díaz-Pinés, Sonia Roig & Agustín Rubio

  2. CIFOR-INIA, Madrid, Spain

    Fernando Montes

  3. Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

    Eugenio Díaz-Pinés

  4. National Museum of Natural Sciences – CSIC, Madrid, Spain

    Raquel Benavides

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  1. Nuria Simón
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  2. Fernando Montes
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  3. Eugenio Díaz-Pinés
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  5. Sonia Roig
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Correspondence to Nuria Simón.

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Responsible Editor: Zucong Cai.

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Simón, N., Montes, F., Díaz-Pinés, E. et al. Spatial distribution of the soil organic carbon pool in a Holm oak dehesa in Spain. Plant Soil 366, 537–549 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-012-1443-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-012-1443-9

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