Abstract
Chemical analysis of total calcium in soil samples from Mendolong research area revealed that they had a very low calcium content. The content was so low that the harvesting of stemwood and stembark from all trees larger than 20 cm DBH should result in the loss of about 19% of all calcium in the ecosystem down to 50 cm depth. This finding was not expected based on earlier results of analyses of foliar contents and contents of exchangeable calcium in the soil.
Comparable figures for total calcium contents in the soil are not available from other tropical rainforest ecosystems. They have therefore been calculated by multiplying literature values for concentrations of total calcium in areas with tropical rainforest climate by soil weights from corresponding depths in Mendolong. The total calcium contents in the mineral soil to 50 cm depth varied from more than 20 000 kg ha− 1 in Chile to less than 200 kg ha− 1 in Brazil. This great variation indicates that not all tropical rainforests have low contents of calcium in their mineral soil. However, low contents can be found in certain areas which can be rather widespread in the humid tropics. In such areas, sustainable forestry is not possible without replacing the calcium lost from forest harvesting.
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Nykvist, N. (1998). Logging can cause a serious lack of calcium in tropical rainforest ecosystems: An example from Sabah, Malaysia. In: Schulte, A., Ruhiyat, D. (eds) Soils of Tropical Forest Ecosystems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03649-5_8
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