Source apportionment of water use during vegetation succession on the Loess Plateau, China
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Ecosystem Science, Soil Science, Natural Resource Management, Ecohydrology
- Keywords
- Vegetation succession, Root system, Isotope, Soil-water contribution
- Copyright
- © 2018 Enhao et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Source apportionment of water use during vegetation succession on the Loess Plateau, China. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26980v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26980v1
Abstract
Background. The Chinese government implemented the largest environmental recovery plan in the 1990s, the Grain for Green Project, on the Loess Plateau to prevent soil erosion. Extensive areas of cultivated land were abandoned and then gradually restored with communities of native vegetation. Little is known, however, about the successional development of these communities and their strategies of water use.
Methods. We collected soil and root samples from four vegetation communities at different stages of succession (Artemisia capillaris, A. sacrorum, Bothriochloa ischaemum and Lespedeza davurica) in the dry and wet seasons of 2015 in the Wangmaogou watershed of the Wuding River.
Results. Both the root systems and soil-water contents tended to increase with successional development and fluctuated with changes of the dry and wet seasons. Isotopic analysis indicated that the thawing of winter snow during the dry season in April provided sufficient soil water. The vegetation communities only used the water in the 0-20 cm soil layer during the early successional stage. This range increased to 0-100 cm as the succession developed, with strong seasonal variation; water was accessed from deeper soil during the dry season, and water was accessed from shallower soil during the wet season.
Discussion. Antecedent rainfall, soil-water content and root distribution strongly influenced the use of water in all four vegetation communities. In the process of restoration and succession of vegetation communities, the behavior characteristics and water absorption strategies of the root system are the important theoretical basis for optimizing the selection of species and accelerating the speed of ecological restoration in Chinese Loess Plateau.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Seasonal variation of soil-water content in the communities
SWC(Soil-water content) also varied greatly with depth and season(Fig.4).
Relationship between δD and δ18O of Local Meteoric Water Line (LMWL), Local Meteoric Snow Line (LMSL) and soil water in April
δD and δ18O were correlated with rainfall from June to November (Fig. 5).
Vertical distribution of root-length density (RLD) in the vegetation communities
Fig. 3 shows the vertical distribution of RLD in the soil profile.
Data
Each of the data is the original data of the map. In fact, you can use Origin software to open the "opj" file I uploaded before, so that the graphics can be easily corresponding to the data, and if the typesetting needs, you can also reedit the graphics.