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Soil Phosphorus Concentrations in Dane County, Wisconsin, USA: An Evaluation of the Urban–Rural Gradient Paradigm

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Abstract

Understanding the magnitude and location of soil phosphorus (P) accumulation in watersheds is a critical step toward managing runoff of this pollutant to aquatic ecosystems. Here, I examine the usefulness of urban–rural gradients, an emerging experimental design in urban ecology, for predicting extractable soil P concentrations across a rapidly urbanizing agricultural watershed in southern Wisconsin. I compare several measures of an urban–rural gradient to predictors of soil P such as soil type, slope, topography, land use, land cover, and fertilizer and manure use. Most of the factors that were expected to drive differences in soil P concentrations were found to be poor predictors of Bray-1 (extractable) soil P, which ranged from 4 to 660 ppm; while there were several significant relationships, most explained only a small proportion of the variation. A multiple linear regression model captured approximately 37% of the variation in the data using the urban–rural gradient, topography, land use, land cover, manure use, and soil type as predictors. There was a significant relationship between Bray-1 P concentration and each of the urban–rural gradients, but these relationships explained only between 2.6% and 3.3% of the variation in P concentrations. Extractable P concentration in soils, unlike some other ecosystem properties, is not well predicted by urban–rural gradients.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Tom Pearce and Colleen Flaherty, who helped with data collection and processing. Discussions with Steve Carpenter, Monica Turner, Emily Stanley, Kevin McSweeney, Pete Nowak, and Tim Essington and others helped clarify the thoughts behind this project. Pieter Johnson, Katie Predick, Margaret Carreiro, Jason Kaye, and Jim Baxter provided thoughtful and useful reviews of the manuscript in preparation. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program and the Wisconsin IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education, Research, and Training) project.

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  1. Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin, 680 N. Park St., Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA

    Elena M. Bennett

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  1. Elena M. Bennett
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Correspondence to Elena M. Bennett.

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Bennett, E. Soil Phosphorus Concentrations in Dane County, Wisconsin, USA: An Evaluation of the Urban–Rural Gradient Paradigm . Environmental Management 32, 476–487 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-003-0035-0

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