Effects of Landscape Development Processes on Soil Water Variability and Plant Community Structure
Abstract
Topography determines the soil water variability of a watershed and is controlled by the relative strength of tectonic uplift, diffusive and advective erosions. Plant abundance is dictated by soil water content. Thus, erosion processes are one of the underlying causes of variation of soil water content and plant abundance. Here we express soil water variability both at the watershed scale and among adjacent neighbouring locations as mathematical functions of the relative dominance of competing erosion processes. Plants tolerance distributions: dry, mesic, and wet plants, with soil water content are used to investigate the impact of competing erosion processes on the distribution of the generic plants. This study gives an understanding of co-development of landscapes and plant communities. We find that watersheds with strong diffusive erosion have highly skewed frequency distribution of soil water content with a large range of variation. Increasing the dominance of advective erosion reduces the skewness and the range of variation. Mesic plants are most abundant in strong diffusive erosion dominated watershed and dry plant are most abundant in advective erosion dominated watershed. Hillslopes have neighborhoods of more similar soil water content than the ridge and stream course and plants living there have larger neighbourhoods. Watersheds with strong advective erosion dominance have larger neighboring water content variation and plants have smaller neighbourhood. Plants growing on advective erosion dominated landscape and on the ridge and stream course will benefit from having wider tolerance curve.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.H53E1753D
- Keywords:
-
- 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1813 Eco-hydrology;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1824 Geomorphology: general;
- HYDROLOGY