Critical Zone response to land use change in Gran Paradiso National Park, Italian Alps
Abstract
Abandonment of mountain pastures followed by tree and shrub encroachment is a common event in many Alpine areas of Europe, leading to significant changes in ecosystems and ecotones as well as on the mountain Critical Zone. In 2016 we started annual measurement campaigns in the Noaschetta Valley of Gran Paradiso National Park, a protected area in the north-western Italian Alps, sampling carbon fluxes by flux chamber methods, recording soil temperature, moisture and chemistry, vegetation characteristics and invertebrate biodiversity. This valley is part of a more extended Critical Zone and Ecosystem Observatory recently established in Gran Paradiso. In Noaschetta, we sampled the Critical Zone in cattle exclusion areas and in the nearby pastures where cattle was present, to determine whether and how the Critical Zone in the two types of environments evolved differently. On the long term, these measurements intend to quantify the processes possibly leading to different environmental characteristics depending upon the different use of the areas by the local populations. In this contribution we discuss the results of the measurements and of their statistical analysis.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMPA43A..07B
- Keywords:
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- 0485 Science policy;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1865 Soils;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES