How Saharan Dust Slows River Knickpoints: Coupling Vegetation Canopy, Soils and the Foundation of the Critical Zone

Forest succession theory maintains that trees drape existing landscapes as passive niche optimizers, but in the Luquillo Mountains in Puerto Rico, the forest exerts a powerful control on erosion. The Luquillo Critical Zone observatory is set in the Luquillo Mountains, an isolated massif at the northeastern tip of Puerto Rico Island which receives up to five meters of rainfall annually. Most of the rainfall received in the mountains is conveyed as quick flow through soil macropores, inhibiting soil erosion by overland flow. Physical erosion is kept low, occurring in the form of infrequent shallow landslides, thus increasing the residence time of minerals in the near-surface environment. The extensive chemical alteration of minerals generates a thick saprolite covered by fine-grained soil. Over the quartz diorite bedrock that characterizes the southern side of the mountains, the weathering process generates saprolite tens of meters deep that is almost completely devoid of weatherable minerals. Soils forming over this saprolite are nutrient-poor, forcing the rainforest to retrieve its nutrients from atmospheric fluxes, such as Saharan dust and marine aerosols. These atmospheric inputs are thus indirectly essential for the forest to be able to maintain slow erosion rates over the mountains. At lower elevation, using cosmogenic nuclide-derived denudation rates, we identified a wave of incision which has been propagating upstream over the past 4 My in the form of very steep and slowly migrating knickpoints. Bedrock abrasion and plucking are infrequent along the knickpoint faces, because the bedrock is massive and because rivers are bedload-starved. This situation is due to the highly weathered upland soils and slow erosion rates and high weathering rate upstream, which acts to reduce bedload grain size and limits bedload fluxes to the knickpoint, respectively. The soils change radically where the wave of erosion has passed and has increased erosion rates. There, nutrient-rich minerals make their way up into the soils, providing available cations to the forest. This is in turn has a measurable effect on forest biomass and on forest species composition.